[asveikau]

I found this hard to read.

At one point in my life I came to an epiphany on this topic. Everybody's life is improbable. Literally everybody, all the time, without any effort.

Through the lens of this I saw myself as being the type of person who looks at things in life through averages, sizing up what's likely, and I realized that in my own story there were a lot of very improbable occurrences. Even if we understand statistics, we shouldn't let our knowledge of what's likely or most common get in the way of appreciation this uniqueness, or cloud our view of it. I took this observation to mean to be less judgemental, less the type to want to size something up and put it in a statistical bucket.

[rozap]

I was recently talking to a friend about this, the concept of a normie. A normie is kind of a mirage, it only exists in the realm of statistics, but when you look at any one individual who could fit that label, they are unlikely, so, can they really be a normie? Once internalized, the only real way out is to be less judgemental. Sure, you won't be friends with everyone, but the buckets are just not super useful when looking at an individual.

[helloplanets]

The usual way of measuring a trait would basically be measuring N amount of people on a specific thing, and the distribution based on that. But if you take 1 person, and N amount of specific things/traits, just about everyone would probably make their own sort of distribution with a bunch of "normal" traits and a long tail of "unusual" traits.

Still a simplification, but has made the "illusion of a normie" clearer to me.

[perilunar]

This is literally true on a physical level: The US airforce did a study in the 1950s that showed none of the thousands pilots they measured matched the average across multiple body measurements. i.e. no one was average.

https://austraffic.com.au/aba/us-air-force-finds-averages-ca...

Edit: the report itself:

  THE "AVERAGE MAN"?
  Gilbert S. Daniels, December 1952

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0010203.pdf

[helloplanets]

Thank you for linking this! It's great. :)