A crux here is that I think there are reasons beyond defining it to be normal that the normal distribution prevails, and the biggest reason for this is that I generally model the contributions of human intelligence as additive, not an AND function and in particular that they are independent, that is one gene for intelligence can do it’s work without requiring any other genes. This basically lets us construct the normal distribution, and explains why it’s useful to model it as a normal distribution.
As far as the result that task performance is heavy tailed, another consistent story is that what’s going on is people get mostly lucky, and then post-hoc a story about how their innate intelligence/sheer willpower made them successful, and this is important, since I suspect it’s the most accurate story given the divergence of us being normal, but the world is extreme.
A lot of genes have multiplicative effects instead of additive effects. E.g. vegetable size is surprisingly log-normally distributed, not normally distributed, so I don’t think you should have a huge prior on normal here. See also one of my favorite papers of all time “Log-Normal Distributions Across The Sciences”.
A crux here is that I think there are reasons beyond defining it to be normal that the normal distribution prevails, and the biggest reason for this is that I generally model the contributions of human intelligence as additive, not an AND function and in particular that they are independent, that is one gene for intelligence can do it’s work without requiring any other genes. This basically lets us construct the normal distribution, and explains why it’s useful to model it as a normal distribution.
As far as the result that task performance is heavy tailed, another consistent story is that what’s going on is people get mostly lucky, and then post-hoc a story about how their innate intelligence/sheer willpower made them successful, and this is important, since I suspect it’s the most accurate story given the divergence of us being normal, but the world is extreme.
A lot of genes have multiplicative effects instead of additive effects. E.g. vegetable size is surprisingly log-normally distributed, not normally distributed, so I don’t think you should have a huge prior on normal here. See also one of my favorite papers of all time “Log-Normal Distributions Across The Sciences”.