The Marvelous, Bad Ideas That Are Worth $Billions

t’s well-known that statistics is a deceptively difficult topic to understand—at least, it’s well-known among people who’ve had some training about those deceptive difficulties. One concept, though, that seems to penetrate the barriers to statistical understanding is the normal distribution, the standard bell curve. Even if people don’t have the mathematical language to describe it, many have an intuitive handle on normal distributions—that, for instance, most people are near average in height, while some are short