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Comment by jacobr1

2 days ago

Normal isn't a myth. The mistake people make is taking the mode as normal, or worse mistaking their own experience as normal. But humans generally do tend to have a range of common behaviors that a significant percentage of people fit into. And you probably can even predict it to a reasonable degree, if you have some other metadata to correlate which sub-group they might correspond to.

Normal in the sense of "you can model a distribution of human behavioral processes or outcomes" that encompasses, say, 95% of humans in a given culture or geography is very much a thing you can do. And I'd go as far as to say a large chunk of the mental bandwidth of the average person is running those simulation models just to operate in a multi-human-agent world.

(If you want to say we observe bimodal or other multi-peaked distributions in practices rather than "normal" ones, I will strongly agree, but that usually isn't the objection when people say "normal is a myth")

Fair enough, perhaps I could have said "normal is relative"

A behavior may be typical, or common maybe, but I think "normal" evokes certain connotations when describing human behavior.