The 80/20 Rule

Everybody has heard of the 80/20 rule. That is, 80% of situations are covered by 20% of resources available. The other 80% of resources are used to cover just 20% of circumstances. What is the basis of this rule and why do I bring it up? It all has to do with the statistical chart representing the normal or more formally the Gaussian distribution of possibilities aka the Bell Curve. Here is the formal definition as defined by Wikipedia:

In probability theory, the normal (or Gaussian) distribution is a very common continuous probability distribution. Normal distributions are important in statistics and are often used in the natural and social sciences to represent real-valued random variables whose distributions are not known. A random variable with a Gaussian distribution is said to be normally distributed and is called a normal deviate.

The Bell Curve or Gaussian distribution looks like this:



The reason it is called the normal distribution is because when you measure normal processes, this is normally how they lay out. And if you take enough of the curve of to account for 80% of the possibilities, you still have 20% of the remaining height to cover everything else.

Think about flipping a coin. You'd say it was 50/50 whether it is heads or tails. But that isn't true. I saw on Wikipedia that an ordinary nickel has a 1 in 6000 chance of landing on the edge. Life is that way. When things happen, mostly they happen a certain way but sometimes they happen a different way. But if you plan for the most common occurrences and devote the majority of your resources to cover those, you won't be using the lion's share of your resources.

So why do I bring this up? Tomorrow, I am going to write about the 20/80 rule which is all about the outliers. That is the only reason I can write science fiction is because I go beyond the "norm" to write about things that we don't encounter very often. And on Monday, you get the payoff which is about Tesla's new semi which exploits the 80/20 rule to a tee.

So come back tomorrow and we'll talk about oddities.