this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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Science Memes

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Moon Dust (lemmynsfw.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Not every error bar represents a Gaussian, if for no other reason that most error bars aren't symmetric.

The error bars for small sample size relative to population size are Gaussian.

Error due to a non-representative sample can have a variety of shapes, but their distribution might also be unknown. We do frequently, almost implicitly, assume unknown distributions to be Gaussian, but we should recognize that's not necessarily a true fact about the universe.