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Comment by funnay | Hacker News Reader

When you sample a population you infer the type of distribution and try to sample it in a way that respects the distribution properties, because that can have a great impact on the results.

I'm afraid most people here criticizing her normal distribution remarks are oversimplifying it much more than her.

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The author’s word salad honestly doesn’t qualify as ‘remarks about the normal distribution.’ The author is wildly flinging random technical terms around. Try substituting ‘normal distribution’ with ‘exponential distribution’ or simply with ‘collecting data’. You can draw two possible conclusions from that sentence: either the author believes that observing data or —- horror —- drawing it is racist, a violently anti-knowledge stance, or the author is stringing words together like GPT-3 in hopes of sounding woke. This kind of discourse is an insult to science and an embarrassment to the journal.

I think most of the problem with the statement is that it is ambiguous. If she is saying that the Gaussian distribution is used because it assumes there exists people who are the mean average representatives of humanity; then she is just failing to understand what the law of large numbers implies about the distribution of sample mean(X) regardless of the distribution of X.

If on the other hand she is saying that a problem in healthcare is that significantly different sub-populations are lumped together resulting in inappropriate benchmarks for some sub-populations, that is more palatable. Even if this latter interpretation is not true, at least it isn't false by definition.

Very funny how you are doing more of that Derrida thing yourself.

The problem with the claim lies in the attempt to associate a strictly technical concept (the normal distribution) to $GENERIC_BAD_STUFF with nothing more than vague wordplay.

Also, just FYI, you have it the other way around. When you sample from a population, you (usually) assume a certain distribution (at most you infer parameters). For example, if you're sampling for opinion polls, you would actually want to oversample minorities and then correct back.

Sorry, I meant assume instead of infer. *not english native.

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