Re:Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]
by tomrod on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @07:07PM
(#12594050)
Your point is well stated! I demured that my point would be pedantic since it was pointing out an inappropriate comparison with the Gaussian analogy.
All this said, I'm hugely and awesomely excited by the future prospects of becoming a multiplanet species.
The Gaussian depends upon a notion of independence and identical distribution: independence can be dispensed of when one thinks about power laws.
If you can soberly state the assumption that the effects of a comment on any other comment is completely negligible, or falls into a couple of other strange exceptions that leads to the universal phenomena that generates the Gaussian, then and only then can you state that any quantity associated with comments is Gaussian. I do not think that this can be soberly stated as such.