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wedrifid comments on When None Dare Urge Restraint, pt. 2 - Less Wrong
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Yes, which is why it's an awesome go to test to apply to generalizations. Death, extinction, torture forever, saving billions of people!
That test is only useful if you're interested in illustrating exceptions to the norm. The graph, I think, does a brilliant job of illustrating normalized expectations.
I would assume that for most generalizations, it either shouldn't be a generalization, or else it's meant to illustrate normalized expectations. So the test seems useless unless you simply need to demonstrate that, duh, generalizations tend to have exceptions.
'Generalizations' is an interesting word in as much as it expresses nearly the opposite meaning depending on the kind of person who speaks it (and to a lesser extent, the context).
Can you expand on what you actually mean by that? I've always taken a generalization to mean "a broad statement that is true for the majority (but not all) specific instances of the group". For instance, one can generalize that humans have 2 arms - this, despite there being a number of exceptions, and the average (mean) values being less than 2.