What is normal?

[anotherlife]

Normally this, normally that. But what is normal? Is there even such a thing as normal?

I thought that normal is like the expected look of a random system. For example, out of 100 random men, if you pick any one, normal is that that guy is straight, not gay.

But in school, you learn, that there is no such thing, and there is no normal. Now what shall I think? This is sooo confusing!

 

[IsaacNewton]

The meaty part of the bell curve. What Is a Bell Curve?

People with five fingers and five toes are 'normal'. But there are people with other numbers of both. Normal on the street has come to mean something different, it is taken as 'sane, ok, not weird, like everyone else...'. Technically a genius isn't normal and could be called abnormal. Out of the norm. Not in the bell curve.

And it isn't normal for me to spend this much effort on a thread like this but it seemed like an honest question.

 

[anotherlife]

The meaty part of the bell curve. What Is a Bell Curve?

People with five fingers and five toes are 'normal'. But there are people with other numbers of both. Normal on the street has come to mean something different, it is taken as 'sane, ok, not weird, like everyone else...'. Technically a genius isn't normal and could be called abnormal. Out of the norm. Not in the bell curve.

And it isn't normal for me to spend this much effort on a thread like this but it seemed like an honest question.

What really puzzles me is how they can deny the existence of the normal, when you have a large number of samples, such as the number of people in the school.