The appearance of abnormality in our political climate is daunting to many. However, if one were to observe the phenomena through the lens of the statistical world, it would be simply considered the consequences of an outlier. Which brings me to wonder if the founding fathers brought into account statistics when writing the Constitution.
The basic definition of an outlier is an extreme value that does not follow the norm or the pattern of the majority of our data. Here we need to think of the voting population in terms of data. But what do we do when in politics an outlier rises to the top? What happens when an individual appears to be out of sync with the norm, when an outlier skews everything we are used to? Should we be surprised, or should we look at the human population as a lesson in statistics? The mean (the average in statistics) is non-resistant. That means it’s affected by outliers. More specifically, the mean will want to move towards the outlier. In statistical math, there are several ways to deal with an outlier, remove it or replace the value with one of less extreme. So, taking all this account, we can’t take our current situation as an anomaly.
Eventually, an outlier had to show up.
Blogging Einstein 