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A comment on Gov Parson pushes to prosecute reporter who found security flaw in state site. Parent comment

Re:Gov Parson pushes to prosecute reporter who found securit... by arcticbull on Thursday October 21, 2021 @01:18PM (#28947740)
> Please don't make this a partisan issue. I live in Missouri. I've voted for Republicans in the past. You're alienating people like me from being on your side.

Every group of humans - indeed, thanks to the central limit theorem, every sufficiently large sampling - is going to be normally distributed and there are going to be folks on either side offset from the mean.

However, that doesn't indicate that the mean isn't interesting or worthwhile to discuss, and isn't representative of the group as a whole.

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Re:Gov Parson pushes to prosecute reporter who found securit... by leephillips on Thursday October 21, 2021 @01:20PM (#28947788)
That’s not what the central limit theorem says, and it’s not and cannot be true in practice.
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Re:Gov Parson pushes to prosecute reporter who found securit... by arcticbull on Thursday October 21, 2021 @01:23PM (#28947844)
I was taking humans political opinions as the sum of a sum of independent random variables :) still may have been a bit of flourish, I suppose.
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Re:Gov Parson pushes to prosecute reporter who found securit... by leephillips on Thursday October 21, 2021 @01:30PM (#28947947)
Sorry, still doesn’t mean that the quantity that you’re averaging (position on the left-right political spectrum?) will be normally distributed. In fact, it almost certainly won’t be. But it’s a common error.
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Re:Gov Parson pushes to prosecute reporter who found securit... by arcticbull on Thursday October 21, 2021 @01:35PM (#28948016)
Well, thank you for letting me know!
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Re:Gov Parson pushes to prosecute reporter who found securit... by danbmil99 on Friday October 22, 2021 @05:08AM (#28955108)
As someone else responded, in the case of United States politics in 2021, it's pretty clear that there is not a normal gaussian distribution of opinions on various matters. I suspect for all the hot-button issues it's extremely bimodal.
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