Bell Curves
January 12, 2018
No, not the racist bullshit artist’s book.
One thing I realized a few years ago is that for human attributes, bell curves are everywhere. The standard examples are things like height and weight, but why not, say, strength, or patience, or organizational skills, or empathy? Some people have more, some people have less, and there’s no particular reason to treat them as much different from (say) physical strength; something that we possess in different quantities, and something that we can improve within bounds, but that improvement itself takes work, and the bounds are real.
“Work” generalizes similarly. We can get tired of walking, of lifting, of thinking, of maintaining a pleasant attitude, and so on.
