Quote:
Originally Posted by joefromchicago
No, it's a bell curve - or at least bell-curve-like.
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Isolating the athletes, therefore, doesn't result in a small section of a larger bell curve, it results in a bell curve distribution itself.
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And this argument made no sense to me. If you have a certain distribution of data, then remove data points randomly, the remaining data points should still be distributed in the same way as the original data. So if you think athletic skill is distributed on a bell curve, so that MLB players are the extreme right tail of that curve, the fact that some random collection of MLB-calibre athletes instead take up golf or accounting or cinematography doesn't change the expected distribution of skills at all. You'd still expect to see the tail end of a bell curve.