The problem, as it were, alluded to by the piece, is that many traits <i>are</i> normal. They give the example of height, but this applies to many other things as well. So understanding how you get from one distribution to the other is the real issue.<p>Survivorship bias also can be modeled using a pareto distribution (search for "pareto survival", or just notice the mention of insurance modeling), but of course the piece doesn't spin the pareto that way.<p>Costs can also be modeled as a pareto as well (<a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161212115702.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161212115702.h...</a>). So if you have a right skewed pareto on one end, and a left skewed pareto on the other...<p>It's disturbing to me how statistical distributions get used in this way as political bludgeons.<p>Statistically there are other reasons to use the normal even when it's known to be false, having to do with how to handle various forms of uncertainty. Is it overused? Probably. But if you had to pick something by default you'd get much further with the normal. Pretty far actually.