World Is Not Normal

The "great" insight here should be that anything normal can also be mapped as 80/20 and vice-versa. How you decide to map it is more of a political choice, or maybe an emotional one, based on where you fall on any given economic or social curve.

The medium, in other words, is the message. Every one of these things can be plotted on a bell curve if you frame it differently:

>> A handful of cities inhabit most of the world population;

Change to distribution of land per person on earth

>>majority of revenue for organizations comes from a handful of products;

Change to products bought per consumer, or revenue as a whole

>>a handful of nations win most of the gold medals at the Olympics;

Change to average gold medals per nation

All the 80/20 does in the above cases is lop off the bottom end of the curve.

The problem, as it were, alluded to by the piece, is that many traits are normal. They give the example of height, but this applies to many other things as well. So understanding how you get from one distribution to the other is the real issue.

Survivorship bias also can be modeled using a pareto distribution (search for "pareto survival", or just notice the mention of insurance modeling), but of course the piece doesn't spin the pareto that way.

Costs can also be modeled as a pareto as well (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161212115702.h...). So if you have a right skewed pareto on one end, and a left skewed pareto on the other...

It's disturbing to me how statistical distributions get used in this way as political bludgeons.

Statistically there are other reasons to use the normal even when it's known to be false, having to do with how to handle various forms of uncertainty. Is it overused? Probably. But if you had to pick something by default you'd get much further with the normal. Pretty far actually.

Been removed?