“It showed how a young and promiscuous concept has exerted such a powerful influence on our lives”
Yes, stay away from using “weaponize” for the same reason.
Saul D
1 year ago
Normal in the sense of ‘standardised’ predates 1800. In 18th century France and Germany it was used in the form of ‘Normal school’ for educating teachers in the correct form of pedagogy (norms eg for standard Latin and religion education).
It derives from norma – a carpenter’s square from which we get the sense of ‘fixing the angle correctly’. But also the perpendicular meaning used in geometry (Regula – the carpenter’s ruler – gives us regulations).
Similarly, the normal curve was originally derived by De Moivre but is more correctly called the Gaussian curve as Gauss used it to account for random variation in astronomical observations (1809). Quetelet, formerly an astronomer, applied it to social measurements in the 1840s, rather than invented it. He was obsessed with averages and observed population measures often followed the Guassian curve. However, that’s not why the curve is called ‘normal’
The shape became referred to by the name of ‘normal curve’ by statistics theorists in the late 1870-90s because it was the ‘standard’ distribution most commonly found in mathematical statistical theory – not because it measured ‘normalness’.
So to the name of the book ‘Am I normal?’ in older times would be interpreted as do I meet the norms and standards of the day – which today’s ecoles normales would include diversity and gender identity as normal. It’s not the same as ‘Am I average?’ or less clumsly written as ‘Am I typical?’ Normal people, however, wouldn’t notice the distinction.
It seems to me, when I was young, there were strict behavioural norms but as long as those norms were observed, there was much greater freedom of thought and expression. I lived in a small town, everyone knew everyone by name or by sight. To encounter someone and not say hello would be considered extremely rude, but there was plenty of eccentric behaviour that was never commented upon, in fact eccentricity was considered an essential characteristic. There was the phrase – an English man’s home is his castle.
My own childhood memories are similar, particularly in this interesting way. There were gay couples whose “story” was widey accepted by most of the town. Two women “sharing a house”. Or two men “vacationing” together. There would be seperate bedrooms or hotel rooms, but where they actually slept wasn’t considered to be ayone’s business.
By the time I figured this out it hardly seemed unusual or even worthy of mention. The adults around me said and did some wacky things, but this, ignoring the obvious for the sake of social peace, seemed perfectly sensible.
Jeremy Bray
1 year ago
An interesting but rather unfocused and rambling article based on Chaney’s book.
While “normal” is often used as an Arnold White type informal statistic meaning ‘something that I and my friends think and do and you ought to too’, no one would actually want to be operated by someone with “normal” ability in the sense of falling within the hump of the bell curve. Instead you want someone not only with skill that falls at the desirable end of the bell curve for the population but ideally at the desirable end of the bell curve for qualified surgeons. In this sense being abnormal is widely known to be desirable where particular skills are required.
You certainly would not want a surgeon that was regarded as “Normal for Norfolk” by his colleagues.
Quite agree. Depending on the metric in question, interpretation will vary. And interpretation is king.
The technocratic classes, meanwhile, worship statistics in a cargo cult manner, LARPing the manipulation of numbers to give a neat answer, whilst missing the critical limitations of what they think they know.
If by “technocratic classes” you mean the broad swathe of civil servants and politicians, I agree that because, for the most part, they are statistically illiterate they are unable to interpret such statistics as they do receive and put them in proper context. The pandemic revealed the abysmal level of statistical knowledge particularly among MSM journalists.
Yes, that’d be a good working definition. Essentially, I mean anyone who begins with a model of the world and then tries to hammer messy old reality into that mould. Adverse outcomes then become other people’s fault, or at least the effect of confounding variables – but never the fault of the technocrat.
John Ralston Saul was quite good on that topic, as I recall.
normal for Norfolk? Nothing wrong with that? nice guns, old shooting bags, Guards boating jackets, Schoffels and tweed caps, lots of land and no Pooters in miles…
Paula 0
1 year ago
”….It showed how a young and promiscuous concept has exerted such a powerful influence on our lives…”
Yeah, also with the use of “WEAPONIZED.” Please, can’t we argue using terminology in common usage from at least five years back?
My head is filled with garbage concepts, newly coined, viralized…it is a sickness. Resist for the sake of all our sanity, please. Stop using the hip terms. If we think with older terms, we might find our way out of these riptides.
As I write this, d**k Cheney’s offspring is doing the three phrase trick, to prove how patriotic and right she must be. Beware of the listed three reasons, the listed three adjectives. This is a sign one is being bamboozled by someone who is just pouring out rhetoric.
Lol. Sorry, Richard Cheney! lololol Ilooked back, and I wrote his name with a capital D. This is on the algorithm, not me.
I suspect there is confusion between the words ordinary and normal. Mental illness can be normalised but true mental illness by its very nature cannot be ordinary. Post traumatic stress is a normal response to genuinely traumatic events, the resultant behaviour is unlikely to be ordinary. I am thinking of a friend’s father who suffered post traumatic stress from his experiences fighting in WWII; every time a plane flew over the house he would run for cover and hide under the dining table insisting all the other members of the family join him for their own safety: abnormal behaviour is a normal response to great trauma. Ordinary emotions and struggles in life have been pathologised. Dante wrote the divine comedy as a self help guide for ordinary people (it was the first work to be written in Italian, the vernacular, so ordinary people could have access) as a way out of depression – Midway through my life in my thirty fifth year, I found myself in a dark wood (first line). Maybe the NHS should prescribe Dante, Plato has been found to relieve depression as well. Recent research suggests medication for depression which interferes with serotonin levels is ineffective, a waste of money.
Last edited 1 year ago by Aphrodite Rises
Bob Null
1 year ago
My local weatherman has begun using “normal” to refer to the temperature when he means “average.” So he talks about the temperatures being higher than normal but then one sees in the graphic posted earlier that the record high was recorded in 1934. Forty or so years ago, my doctoral advisor told me (when discussing an early dissertation draft), “God***it, Bob, words have to mean something!” I think about that a lot as I see words being used carelessly all the time nowadays, such as “expert,” “science,” “data,” “misinformation,” and many others, now including “normal”.
Weather forecasting now incorporates a moral element. If some weather is normal then other weather is abnormal – something to be feared. Weather forecasters are amongst the prophets of doom – the end of the world is nigh, but instead of being commanded to stop sinning (in the traditional sense), we are instructed to reduce are CO2 emissions: licentiousness is fine. Time for some human sacrifice though the prophets of doom – the Markle’s, Emma Thompson, Leonardo di Caprio etc.- have no intention of being part of the sacrifice.
‘Democracy’ and ‘fascism’ have become almost meaningless these days.
Raymond Inauen
1 year ago
Normal, a word that means boring to those off us who aren’t interested in being normal. Averaging out things is the best way to turn everything into a sterile landscape that removes the wonderful bio diversity of our species. Normal is exactly the opposite of what most people call normal, it’s means you always have both sides of the coin, the good, the bad and the ugly.
– I wasn’t finished writing and accedentily posted the text while on the run.
Ideal and idealization seem to be a human desire. The Greeks created statues of idealized heroic figures that everyone wanted to emulate. The Romans copied the Greeks and created marvels that are all idealizations of the human figure in imposing positions. Are these ancient cultures to be criticized for their bias through idealization, or is it our nature to always seek the most beautiful and imposing in life. Is this normal or abnormal?
Let’s take a rainbow as an analogy: A rainbow is only a rainbow if it has all its colors. The same applies to our species: it is only normal if it has the full spectrum of characteristics, which includes both the good and the bad qualities. If one or the other were left out, we could not have the full range of characters and personalities. This is a concept that many people have a hard time wrapping their heads around.
Agreed: statistics are useful as descriptors and then only when used judiciously and as impartially as may be achieved.
Statistical measurements should not be seen as prescriptive. That is a grave fallacy and has led us down some foul byways. Reliance on statistical data as an absolute guide is typically the result of lazy thinking (or other more general shirking of responsibility for one’s necessary choices).
It also holds true more often than not, that in my own field (life sciences), “normal” (I prefer “Gaussian”) distributions are usually not the norm at all. Bi-modality, kurtosis and skew all conspire to confound the comfortable assumptions of central limit theorem. The patterns in data sets – the “abnormalities” – are what makes them interesting, to me and most of my colleagues.
The finer details of biochemistry and cell biology may, of necessity, describe fairly reliable limits, but even then we qualify data distributions with a confidence interval (usually 95% of the data distribution).
So, “normality” is even strictly qualified at the molecular level: at the level of our perceived reality it is at best a comforting fiction.
Agreed, because that is what Darwin recognized: Without diversity and adaptation through evolution, nothing would change. Normal means that change can only occur if there is room for variation and adaptation. That means deviations are needed otherwise it wouldn’t work.
Excellent point – I hadn’t considered positing that aspect.
Quite agree: the Gaussian distribution is a useful tool but not any guide to a desirable state of affairs! If only the political left would recognise this we’d probably be in a better state…
Pleasure! “Leptokurtic” and “platykurtic” always make me smile too: the one puts me in mind of an obscure skeletal complaint, the other a novel marsupial…
Linda Hutchinson
1 year ago
Many (if not all) parents want their children to be normal, but exceptional at the same time. What they often mean by “normal” is “fit in”; not necessarily an unreasonable desire.
The antonyms are telling. The opposite of normal is abnormal, the opposite of ordinary is extraordinary. Parents are often conflicted in their desires, as are people in general, the extraordinary is abnormal. The abnormalities of the extraordinary are being used against them to cancel them. Eric Gill comes to mind, there is no doubt he was an extraordinary artist, and his behaviour was abnormal – it broke cultural norms. Caravaggio was a murderer.
Last edited 1 year ago by Aphrodite Rises
Paul Rogers
1 year ago
I have just educated myself on Hacker T. Dog.
He’s very funny. Humour cures many of life’s ills.
Hell, yes. To possibly misquote R. L. Stevenson: “nothing like a little judicious levity”.
Mark Kennedy
1 year ago
This is not a normal essay… it’s too informative, insightful and non-polemical and isn’t trying to convert me or sell me anything. What’s the matter with the author–doesn’t he understand his normal role?
Tony Reardon
1 year ago
In Australia, we recently had a media report of a new batch of census data that stated: The average Australian:
The average Australian is a 37-year-old woman
74 per cent of the the population were born in Australia
54 per cent had both parents born here
61 per cent identify as Christian
One in five have no religion at all
19 per cent speak a language other than English at home
The most common language other than English is Mandarin
This claim about an average for sex is obviously a complete nonsense – an “average” when there are only two categories is a complete misuse of the term. The accurate report would simply be that the population splits 50.45% female. 49.55% male.
Note that it doesn’t say that the average Australian is born in Australia to Australian born parents, is Christian and only speaks English. I wonder why. Lies, damn lies and statistics?
Michael Upton
1 year ago
Those who were “puzzled because they remembered the summer of 1976” might be set at ease by recalling that the summer of 1975 is reported to have broken heat records that had stood since 1947, and which themselves stood until 1995.
Nicky Samengo-Turner
1 year ago
“Hello, I’m Glenn Normal on the 7.53 up from Seveneoaks, on my lap top, with my work security pass reound my neck…reading a car magazine…. I work in ‘ hinsurance…I am a dull, tedious non entity….Drone… bore…” Normal? I’d rather be in Rampton or Broadmoor
“It showed how a young and promiscuous concept has exerted such a powerful influence on our lives”
Yes, stay away from using “weaponize” for the same reason.
Normal in the sense of ‘standardised’ predates 1800. In 18th century France and Germany it was used in the form of ‘Normal school’ for educating teachers in the correct form of pedagogy (norms eg for standard Latin and religion education).
It derives from norma – a carpenter’s square from which we get the sense of ‘fixing the angle correctly’. But also the perpendicular meaning used in geometry (Regula – the carpenter’s ruler – gives us regulations).
Similarly, the normal curve was originally derived by De Moivre but is more correctly called the Gaussian curve as Gauss used it to account for random variation in astronomical observations (1809). Quetelet, formerly an astronomer, applied it to social measurements in the 1840s, rather than invented it. He was obsessed with averages and observed population measures often followed the Guassian curve. However, that’s not why the curve is called ‘normal’
The shape became referred to by the name of ‘normal curve’ by statistics theorists in the late 1870-90s because it was the ‘standard’ distribution most commonly found in mathematical statistical theory – not because it measured ‘normalness’.
So to the name of the book ‘Am I normal?’ in older times would be interpreted as do I meet the norms and standards of the day – which today’s ecoles normales would include diversity and gender identity as normal. It’s not the same as ‘Am I average?’ or less clumsly written as ‘Am I typical?’ Normal people, however, wouldn’t notice the distinction.
It seems to me, when I was young, there were strict behavioural norms but as long as those norms were observed, there was much greater freedom of thought and expression. I lived in a small town, everyone knew everyone by name or by sight. To encounter someone and not say hello would be considered extremely rude, but there was plenty of eccentric behaviour that was never commented upon, in fact eccentricity was considered an essential characteristic. There was the phrase – an English man’s home is his castle.
My own childhood memories are similar, particularly in this interesting way. There were gay couples whose “story” was widey accepted by most of the town. Two women “sharing a house”. Or two men “vacationing” together. There would be seperate bedrooms or hotel rooms, but where they actually slept wasn’t considered to be ayone’s business.
By the time I figured this out it hardly seemed unusual or even worthy of mention. The adults around me said and did some wacky things, but this, ignoring the obvious for the sake of social peace, seemed perfectly sensible.
An interesting but rather unfocused and rambling article based on Chaney’s book.
While “normal” is often used as an Arnold White type informal statistic meaning ‘something that I and my friends think and do and you ought to too’, no one would actually want to be operated by someone with “normal” ability in the sense of falling within the hump of the bell curve. Instead you want someone not only with skill that falls at the desirable end of the bell curve for the population but ideally at the desirable end of the bell curve for qualified surgeons. In this sense being abnormal is widely known to be desirable where particular skills are required.
You certainly would not want a surgeon that was regarded as “Normal for Norfolk” by his colleagues.
Quite agree. Depending on the metric in question, interpretation will vary. And interpretation is king.
The technocratic classes, meanwhile, worship statistics in a cargo cult manner, LARPing the manipulation of numbers to give a neat answer, whilst missing the critical limitations of what they think they know.
If by “technocratic classes” you mean the broad swathe of civil servants and politicians, I agree that because, for the most part, they are statistically illiterate they are unable to interpret such statistics as they do receive and put them in proper context. The pandemic revealed the abysmal level of statistical knowledge particularly among MSM journalists.
Yes, that’d be a good working definition. Essentially, I mean anyone who begins with a model of the world and then tries to hammer messy old reality into that mould. Adverse outcomes then become other people’s fault, or at least the effect of confounding variables – but never the fault of the technocrat.
John Ralston Saul was quite good on that topic, as I recall.
normal for Norfolk? Nothing wrong with that? nice guns, old shooting bags, Guards boating jackets, Schoffels and tweed caps, lots of land and no Pooters in miles…
”….It showed how a young and promiscuous concept has exerted such a powerful influence on our lives…”
Yeah, also with the use of “WEAPONIZED.” Please, can’t we argue using terminology in common usage from at least five years back?
My head is filled with garbage concepts, newly coined, viralized…it is a sickness. Resist for the sake of all our sanity, please. Stop using the hip terms. If we think with older terms, we might find our way out of these riptides.
As I write this, d**k Cheney’s offspring is doing the three phrase trick, to prove how patriotic and right she must be. Beware of the listed three reasons, the listed three adjectives. This is a sign one is being bamboozled by someone who is just pouring out rhetoric.
Lol. Sorry, Richard Cheney! lololol Ilooked back, and I wrote his name with a capital D. This is on the algorithm, not me.
‘Viralized’?
I suspect there is confusion between the words ordinary and normal. Mental illness can be normalised but true mental illness by its very nature cannot be ordinary. Post traumatic stress is a normal response to genuinely traumatic events, the resultant behaviour is unlikely to be ordinary. I am thinking of a friend’s father who suffered post traumatic stress from his experiences fighting in WWII; every time a plane flew over the house he would run for cover and hide under the dining table insisting all the other members of the family join him for their own safety: abnormal behaviour is a normal response to great trauma. Ordinary emotions and struggles in life have been pathologised. Dante wrote the divine comedy as a self help guide for ordinary people (it was the first work to be written in Italian, the vernacular, so ordinary people could have access) as a way out of depression – Midway through my life in my thirty fifth year, I found myself in a dark wood (first line). Maybe the NHS should prescribe Dante, Plato has been found to relieve depression as well. Recent research suggests medication for depression which interferes with serotonin levels is ineffective, a waste of money.
My local weatherman has begun using “normal” to refer to the temperature when he means “average.” So he talks about the temperatures being higher than normal but then one sees in the graphic posted earlier that the record high was recorded in 1934. Forty or so years ago, my doctoral advisor told me (when discussing an early dissertation draft), “God***it, Bob, words have to mean something!” I think about that a lot as I see words being used carelessly all the time nowadays, such as “expert,” “science,” “data,” “misinformation,” and many others, now including “normal”.
Weather forecasting now incorporates a moral element. If some weather is normal then other weather is abnormal – something to be feared. Weather forecasters are amongst the prophets of doom – the end of the world is nigh, but instead of being commanded to stop sinning (in the traditional sense), we are instructed to reduce are CO2 emissions: licentiousness is fine. Time for some human sacrifice though the prophets of doom – the Markle’s, Emma Thompson, Leonardo di Caprio etc.- have no intention of being part of the sacrifice.
‘Democracy’ and ‘fascism’ have become almost meaningless these days.
Normal, a word that means boring to those off us who aren’t interested in being normal. Averaging out things is the best way to turn everything into a sterile landscape that removes the wonderful bio diversity of our species. Normal is exactly the opposite of what most people call normal, it’s means you always have both sides of the coin, the good, the bad and the ugly.
– I wasn’t finished writing and accedentily posted the text while on the run.
Ideal and idealization seem to be a human desire. The Greeks created statues of idealized heroic figures that everyone wanted to emulate. The Romans copied the Greeks and created marvels that are all idealizations of the human figure in imposing positions. Are these ancient cultures to be criticized for their bias through idealization, or is it our nature to always seek the most beautiful and imposing in life. Is this normal or abnormal?
Let’s take a rainbow as an analogy: A rainbow is only a rainbow if it has all its colors. The same applies to our species: it is only normal if it has the full spectrum of characteristics, which includes both the good and the bad qualities. If one or the other were left out, we could not have the full range of characters and personalities. This is a concept that many people have a hard time wrapping their heads around.
Agreed: statistics are useful as descriptors and then only when used judiciously and as impartially as may be achieved.
Statistical measurements should not be seen as prescriptive. That is a grave fallacy and has led us down some foul byways. Reliance on statistical data as an absolute guide is typically the result of lazy thinking (or other more general shirking of responsibility for one’s necessary choices).
It also holds true more often than not, that in my own field (life sciences), “normal” (I prefer “Gaussian”) distributions are usually not the norm at all. Bi-modality, kurtosis and skew all conspire to confound the comfortable assumptions of central limit theorem. The patterns in data sets – the “abnormalities” – are what makes them interesting, to me and most of my colleagues.
The finer details of biochemistry and cell biology may, of necessity, describe fairly reliable limits, but even then we qualify data distributions with a confidence interval (usually 95% of the data distribution).
So, “normality” is even strictly qualified at the molecular level: at the level of our perceived reality it is at best a comforting fiction.
Agreed, because that is what Darwin recognized: Without diversity and adaptation through evolution, nothing would change. Normal means that change can only occur if there is room for variation and adaptation. That means deviations are needed otherwise it wouldn’t work.
Excellent point – I hadn’t considered positing that aspect.
Quite agree: the Gaussian distribution is a useful tool but not any guide to a desirable state of affairs! If only the political left would recognise this we’d probably be in a better state…
One of the things i enjoy about reading Unherd comments is the introduction to new terms.
kurtosis
Thankyou!
Pleasure! “Leptokurtic” and “platykurtic” always make me smile too: the one puts me in mind of an obscure skeletal complaint, the other a novel marsupial…
Many (if not all) parents want their children to be normal, but exceptional at the same time. What they often mean by “normal” is “fit in”; not necessarily an unreasonable desire.
The antonyms are telling. The opposite of normal is abnormal, the opposite of ordinary is extraordinary. Parents are often conflicted in their desires, as are people in general, the extraordinary is abnormal. The abnormalities of the extraordinary are being used against them to cancel them. Eric Gill comes to mind, there is no doubt he was an extraordinary artist, and his behaviour was abnormal – it broke cultural norms. Caravaggio was a murderer.
I have just educated myself on Hacker T. Dog.
He’s very funny. Humour cures many of life’s ills.
Hell, yes. To possibly misquote R. L. Stevenson: “nothing like a little judicious levity”.
This is not a normal essay… it’s too informative, insightful and non-polemical and isn’t trying to convert me or sell me anything. What’s the matter with the author–doesn’t he understand his normal role?
In Australia, we recently had a media report of a new batch of census data that stated:
The average Australian:
This claim about an average for sex is obviously a complete nonsense – an “average” when there are only two categories is a complete misuse of the term. The accurate report would simply be that the population splits 50.45% female. 49.55% male.
Note that it doesn’t say that the average Australian is born in Australia to Australian born parents, is Christian and only speaks English. I wonder why. Lies, damn lies and statistics?
Those who were “puzzled because they remembered the summer of 1976” might be set at ease by recalling that the summer of 1975 is reported to have broken heat records that had stood since 1947, and which themselves stood until 1995.
“Hello, I’m Glenn Normal on the 7.53 up from Seveneoaks, on my lap top, with my work security pass reound my neck…reading a car magazine…. I work in ‘ hinsurance…I am a dull, tedious non entity….Drone… bore…” Normal? I’d rather be in Rampton or Broadmoor