If you hang out with mathematicians, yeah, sure, everybody knows there's a ton of distributions. Try hanging out with, say, biologists. The undergrad statistics education is basically "mumble mumble guassian mumble hideous equations mumble mumble YOU MUST DO THE CHI-SQUARED TEST mumble mumble poisson mumble hideous equations mumble YOU MUST DO THE CHI-SQUARED TEST mumble mumble CHI mumble calculus is hard mumble mumble NULL HYPOTHESIS mumble CHI CHI CHI WE WILL DRUM YOU OUT OF THIS DISCIPLINE IN DISGRACE IF YOU DON'T DO THE CHI-SQUARED TEST".
I'm hardly even exaggerating! I remember being asked by someone in their third semester of using the damn test what it actually meant.
Nominally, yes, the Poisson and probably a couple of others were mentioned, but believe me, the ALL CAPS part of the education does not mention them.
>I was establishing that there are plenty of people who don't really realize there are other distributions.
Something I never contested.
From Glyptodon:
>>"This is std dev. This is how you compute it. Make sure you put it your tables and report."
>>it wasn't always a sensible thing to be asked to calculate but was instead just an instinctive requirement.
I hate to break it to you, but this is how rote mathematics is taught. You can't communicate concepts purely, and hammering instinctive math is better than no math at all.
To reiterate, there's nothing wrong with the normal distribution. We're not about to retire addition or subtraction just because there are "plenty of people who don't really realize" there's more to math.
>You seem to be having some trouble reading what I'm writing, rather than what you think I should be writing.
See Glyptodon's post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7065067
If you hang out with mathematicians, yeah, sure, everybody knows there's a ton of distributions. Try hanging out with, say, biologists. The undergrad statistics education is basically "mumble mumble guassian mumble hideous equations mumble mumble YOU MUST DO THE CHI-SQUARED TEST mumble mumble poisson mumble hideous equations mumble YOU MUST DO THE CHI-SQUARED TEST mumble mumble CHI mumble calculus is hard mumble mumble NULL HYPOTHESIS mumble CHI CHI CHI WE WILL DRUM YOU OUT OF THIS DISCIPLINE IN DISGRACE IF YOU DON'T DO THE CHI-SQUARED TEST".
I'm hardly even exaggerating! I remember being asked by someone in their third semester of using the damn test what it actually meant.
Nominally, yes, the Poisson and probably a couple of others were mentioned, but believe me, the ALL CAPS part of the education does not mention them.