Tolerance

 

Crown  of Creation 

In loyalty to their kind
They cannot tolerate our minds
In loyalty to our kind
We cannot tolerate their obstruction 

You should never respond to intolerance with intolerance. 

One on my favorite podcasts, Stuff You Should Know, recently did an episode on Fundamentalism.  While I agree with everything that was said, (like that was a surprise), the best outcome to me is that I got a word to use in place of standard deviation. 

I am a semi-retired engineer and one of the things I have been struggling with is the branding problems created in mathematics, especially statistics, which uses the term standard deviation.  IMHO, standard deviation should be rebranded as the degree of tolerance, which IMHO sounds much better.  The synonyms of deviation are perversion, anomaly, error, aberration, abnormality.  However in statistics what is meant is the only the difference from the mean.  If you are confident that the mean is without error, then having no difference from that mean, truth, is good. 

However having a standard deviation of zero, means that you are absolutely certain that the mean IS the truth.  In this instance statistics has a term that IMHO does NOT need to be rebranded.  If the truth is not yet known, then statistics says that distribution of truth is NORMAL.  Tolerance is normal, it is intolerance that is not.  I wrote a blog post previously on the problem of decreasing the standard deviation.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/01/resiliency.html

BTW statistics also shows that for the mean to increase, grow, standard deviation...errr tolerance, has to increase.