because the statistics folks to often think that real world data is supposed to follow a normal distribution like the textbook example they faced in university.
That is, ahem, bullshit. Stupid undergrads might think so for a short while, "statistics folks" do not.
Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a hedge fund that lost billions of dollars because its founders, including nobel prize winners, assumed 1) things that have been uncorrelated for a while will remain uncorrelated, and 2) ridiculously low probabilities of failure calculated from assumptions that events are distributed normally actually apply to analyzing the likelihood of various disastrous investment strategies failing. That is, LTCM reported results as if something which is seen from data to be normal between +/- 2*sigma will be reliably normal out...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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