The common Bell Curve, and how it is used against you.

[Earthlink]

This is a common Bell Curve. It can be used to describe many things, for example, it could be the plotting of the IQ's of the global Human population, with the dimmest on one side, and the brightest on the other.

It could also be a display of what some people would be willing to do to back up an assertion they make, with the most passionate on one side, and those who would do nothing on the other side.

It also describes how different alkaline's affect different people, for example some people feel and have no or little reaction to alcohol, and on the other side are very extreme effects on some from alcohol.

In all cases, the vast majority of the human population experience things similarly, and are not one extreme or another. 2.5% of our population shouldn't be the basis on what the other 97.5% should be paying attention to.

Well, the mainscream media go on and on and on about "some people" and want all of our societal behaviours and institutional behaviours to reflect the stupid, the most affected, and the worst possible case scenario, over and over again.

I actually see a lot of this hype here in this forum.

Personally I view this as idiocy. Allowing the idiots to set the stage for all of us.

This practice needs to be stopped, and the first thing any can do is simply recognize that looking at a tiny spec of our population which resides only on one end of this spectrum of all of us is not in any way a representative of us, how we will behave, or any logical conclusion what so ever that has been formed from only looking at a tiny tiny minority.

So stupid the MSM is ... and any who follow it!!!

[Octavusprime]

I'm not sure this is a "practice to be stopped". It's a simple graph showing the distribution of data where most data points hover at the mean. I agree it only graphs what you are "counting" and will not give you answers to complex questions but I'm not sure the Bell Curve is in itself bad or created for some nefarious purpose.

Cheers,

Octavusprime

[Octavusprime]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think your real beef is with sampling practices. Asking a question to a small subset of a population and then claiming this proves that the entire population fits into that "graphing". If this is what you mean then I hear ya. This is a dangerous game. One needs to sample from a large and diverse subset to have plausible statistical strength. Even then it is not 100% accurate as unforeseen factors could be at work.

Bias can easily be brought into sampling either intentionally or unintentionally. If you are asking a political question and you only ask the question to people who watch Fox News then you are introducing this bias. The data can only be used to show the general opinion of Fox News watchers and not of the entire population of the US.

So yes, be wary of simple graphs being used to explain generalizations of large populations. Graphs can be easily manipulated to show what a person or organization wants others to see by manipulating data collection or results. A graph should never be taken at face value without seeing the data. Outliers are often removed without first identifying why they are an outlier. It may be that the outlier is more important than the points that fit so nicely in a curve.

[Roxann]

The danger comes when one believes, "The study says this; therefore, it must be true of me." When I see one of these curves, I like to think of the positive end of the curve and say, "I'm there in the tail."

[Selkie]

From what I understand, a sample size that is too small will tell you very little, or nothing. It is said, of course, that statistics don't lie, but that liars use (or rather misuse) statistics. Cui bono?

[Citizen No2]

Another excellent thread, brilliant.

Well done, to all.

Regards.