What are these numbers for? Certainly not to show my ignorance about the dangers of inferences at the tails of distributions (the tails are much less well-behaved than the middle, or so the story goes). My point (technically not my point; need a but I heard this in class without a )
What is this I don’t even
Echoing the other comments: the writing here could use a few more revisions. The basic idea also runs into problems- ok, if we have a normal distribution we need lots more people to push out to the tail. But what if intelligence was an exponential distribution? If we had a policy of killing the dumbest 50% every generation, we might end up with something like that instead of a normal. And the tails of an exponential distribution are way taller (since it’s e^-x instead of e^-x^2) than the tails of a normal.
(I’m well aware of the central limit theorem, but in the scenario I’m constructing the makeup of intelligence isn’t independent, meaning we could actually have an exponential distribution, or something like it.)
What is this I don’t even
Echoing the other comments: the writing here could use a few more revisions. The basic idea also runs into problems- ok, if we have a normal distribution we need lots more people to push out to the tail. But what if intelligence was an exponential distribution? If we had a policy of killing the dumbest 50% every generation, we might end up with something like that instead of a normal. And the tails of an exponential distribution are way taller (since it’s e^-x instead of e^-x^2) than the tails of a normal.
(I’m well aware of the central limit theorem, but in the scenario I’m constructing the makeup of intelligence isn’t independent, meaning we could actually have an exponential distribution, or something like it.)