A bell curve is the standard distribution of a single variable over the range of its amplitude among the total population of the data set. It's a "bell" because, when graphed, almost every individual variable has a very low number of examples at both extremes... for things we like, think "bad" and "good". Very rare or very likely. The middle part is where most of the data cluster. The shape of the graph looks like a bell, sometimes tall and sometimes flat, occasionally lopsided. Now think about what might be being measured.
How long do cats live, or how many kittens are in a litter. You can measure (or at least try to measure) anything. How fast do humans talk, or how tall are boys at age four, or how well they do on an IQ Test, or how often do they pick their noses.
Now, when you walk down the street and look at the people you live among, you might not want to consider some traits that, like virtually everything else, align on a bell curve. For example, how likely people are to believe in the moon landing in 1969, or how racist that guy in a red hat is likely to be, or think that Hitler was right about lots of stuff, or... hear me out here,
how assiduously they wipe their anus after defecating.
We really don't like to absorb what statistics tell us; maybe doing so is too painful. We humans (340,000,000 of us in the USA) fall into a broad range of things that can be measured. Things, like, what is the reading grade level and how many people might be illiterate. Or how likely people are to know the name of the president of the United States right now, or how many people believe the crazy Q ANON stuff.
Just don't think about that lefthand side of the bell curve where the "very bad" people are. And white horses, don't think about a white horse.
You're welcome, I think.
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