Comments on: Evolutionary Process and Normalcy

By: Data, Central Tendency, and Normalcy « Primitive Mind

Data, Central Tendency, and Normalcy « Primitive Mind — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:31:45 +0000

[...] to approximate normalcy and meet the assumptions of the Central Limit Theorem. I talked about normalcy in the socio-cultural sense before but, here, normalcy refers to a distribution of data. Without a [...]

By: NH

NH — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 00:09:05 +0000

“conformity more important than critical thinking about the standards to which we conform.”
Fascinating. A bit of a catch 22 though. If we don’t conform to the accepted standards,the ‘normal,’ whether or not we have thought critically on the subject, are we not then behaving in an nonconformist or abnormal way? We become the ‘loners’ or the ‘crazy loners’ that society abhors, that society fails to separate into the ‘alone,’the ‘rejects,’and those with treatable disorders among other abnormalities. Of course,nonconformity by enough people helps change the definition of normal.

By: ubikcan

ubikcan — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:35:10 +0000

I have to agree with a lot of this, though like race, even if normalcy is constructed it is still a lived experience. What it means to "fatally under-consider" this construction is certainly a critical question. Someone who took an interesting perspective on this is Ian Hacking. He wrote a somewhat skeptical book on social constructionism called the Social Construction of What?. More recently he has collected some of his writings, including his classic paper "Making up people" in Historical Ontology. PS, off-topic: Science word of the day is "baramin" and baraminology. Ok, just joking.