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Comment by cainxinth | Hacker News Reader

> What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up.

I already knew that. I even know the percentage roughly. According to the Pareto principle, 80% of people are not totally fucked up, but the 20% that are cause 80% of the problems.

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> I even know the percentage roughly.

No, you don't. This "principle" is not a law of physics, it's just a rule of thumb that may or may not be wildly off the mark for an arbitrary distribution. Its common usage is like statistics horoscope.

Having worked as a data scientist at multiple companies (From FANG to startup), the first thing I look at when I get my hands on data is the existence of the Pareto principle.

I still haven’t found one company where this principle didn’t show up.

What does this prove? If you have lots of data and dimensions, I bet you could just as likely find distributions that are roughly 50/50, 60/40, 90/10, 100/0 if you looked for them.

Agreed. It’s not necessarily 80/20, it’s just that power laws show up a LOT. 90/10, 99/1, etc.

So you massage your features until they can produce a 20-80% split?

Very scientific.

The 50/50 principle always shows up in my histogram with interval of two.

There's a nested Pareto in that 20% of that 20% causes 80% of the 80%. Considering that psychopathy (or whatever the updated term is) runs at a bit more of a percent of the population...

Whats the gender segmentation on that, any info?

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