In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Eric Bohlman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>... one of the easiest ways to >tell that an antipathy is based on prejudice rather than realistic >considerations is to observe that the beliefs purporting to support the >negative attitude are contradictory. I have, for example, heard anti-gay >arguments that *simultaneously* assert that 1) nearly everybody has a >visceral repulsion to the thought of sexual activity between two men *and* >2) without strong taboos against sexual activity between men, most men >would find the thought so attractive that they'd give up heterosexual sex >and procreation would cease. Indeed. Simultaneous assertion that "Jews secretly control the world" and "Jews are genetically inferior" is another obvious example. The phenomenon is hardly confined to antipathy towards denigrated groups, however. Internally contradictory arguments are quite common in public policy discussions. The temptation to cite some particularly egregious current examples is strong, but I've decided that it would just divert discussion away from the mandate of this newsgroup. >I see income distribution as a good, accessible, real-world example of a >distribution that's continuous but not symmetric. Not the best example, I think. There must be a bunch of people with exactly zero income, plus probably another group with income of exactly X, where X is the yearly amount of welfare benefits in whatever jurisdiction is being looked at. So income isn't going to have a continuous distribution. Weights of adult males might be better. If the average is 70kg, there are sure to be at least a few with weight greater than 140kg, but there certainly aren't any with weight less than 0kg. >What would be good >similar examples for distributions that are symmetric but not normal (for >students who aren't yet sophisticated enough for the Cauchy distribution to >be a good example)? This is difficult, since there's usually no reason for a real distribution to by symmetric. Perhaps errors in measurement of longitude? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Radford M. Neal [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept. of Statistics and Dept. of Computer Science [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Toronto http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
