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by abetusk 93 days ago
No, that's not true.

If sums of independent identically distributed random variables converge to a distribution, they converge to a Levy stable distribution [0]. Tails of the Levy stable distribution are power law, which makes them not Gaussian.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution

1 comments

Yes but really what our brains do is use Gaussian Mixture model to cut up those distributions into more granular bell curves which we then call “normal”. Because we find what we are tuned to find.

Eg we find bell curves because we look for bell curves. And given infinite resolution we can find them at some granularity.