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Why Do Physicists Use Gaussian Error Distributions?
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[QUOTE="BWV, post: 6538861, member: 88243"] Interesting piece, but the author does not provide much explanation as to what drives fat tails in these results - the CLT is pretty ubiquitous for things like measurement or sampling errors. I am guessing that power-law effects drive this There was not much explanation of this statement in the OP article So you cannot parametrize the T-dist from a Levy Stable Distribution (but you can the normal). I guess the issue is that defining characteristic of Levy stable distributions is that they do not change when you add multiple sets of data together, but the T-dist converges to normal. My other shallow understanding is that you do get a lot of infinite-variance power law effects in physics (like earthquake energies) or more specifically: [URL]https://geography.as.uky.edu/blogs/jdp/dubious-power-power-laws[/URL] In financial economics, its well understood that you can't do something like apply the normal distribution to power-law distributed quantities like wealth or city sizes, is it less well understood within physics? [/QUOTE]
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Why Do Physicists Use Gaussian Error Distributions?
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