Normal isn't a myth. The mistake people make is taking the mode as normal, or worse mistaking their own experience as normal. But humans generally do tend to have a range of common behaviors that a significant percentage of people fit into. And you probably can even predict it to a reasonable degree, if you have some other metadata to correlate which sub-group they might correspond to.
Normal in the sense of "you can model a distribution of human behavioral processes or outcomes" that encompasses, say, 95% of humans in a given culture or geography is very much a thing you can do. And I'd go as far as to say a large chunk of the mental bandwidth of the average person is running those simulation models just to operate in a multi-human-agent world.
(If you want to say we observe bimodal or other multi-peaked distributions in practices rather than "normal" ones, I will strongly agree, but that usually isn't the objection when people say "normal is a myth")
"Let me put it this way, would you say what you said to someones face? Your best friend? You mother? or father and call them a liar and a dick because they said something that was off? Would you go on some holier than thou lecture on intent and deception? You would?"
They clearly weren't calling you nuts, for what it's worth. Saying something you said is nuts is not the literal saying "the person who said this is clinically insane and should be locked up".
Legitimate question, I don't mean to be insensitive, but are you not a native English speaker or something?
jacobr1|6 days ago
Normal in the sense of "you can model a distribution of human behavioral processes or outcomes" that encompasses, say, 95% of humans in a given culture or geography is very much a thing you can do. And I'd go as far as to say a large chunk of the mental bandwidth of the average person is running those simulation models just to operate in a multi-human-agent world.
(If you want to say we observe bimodal or other multi-peaked distributions in practices rather than "normal" ones, I will strongly agree, but that usually isn't the objection when people say "normal is a myth")
jahsome|6 days ago
A behavior may be typical, or common maybe, but I think "normal" evokes certain connotations when describing human behavior.
threethirtytwo|6 days ago
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Tadpole9181|6 days ago
Oh, I have a perfect response for this!
"Let me put it this way, would you say what you said to someones face? Your best friend? You mother? or father and call them a liar and a dick because they said something that was off? Would you go on some holier than thou lecture on intent and deception? You would?"
They clearly weren't calling you nuts, for what it's worth. Saying something you said is nuts is not the literal saying "the person who said this is clinically insane and should be locked up".
Legitimate question, I don't mean to be insensitive, but are you not a native English speaker or something?