system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Not everything in real life is normally distributed

Taking a data science online course and the guy keeps giving out problems beginning with “assuming height of males in USA is normally distributed, what is x,y,z”.

Sure the math is easier if you give me the mean and std for a population thats normally distributed but in real life this assumption cant possibly be made?

What am I missing?
gpt
Pretty much nothing in real life is ever _truly_ distributed with respect to some parametric distribution (discounting certain asymptotic situations such as when central limit theorems hold (but we're never in asymptotia anyways)).

All distributions, really all models are some sort of simplifying assumption about the real world. In your quote, the word **assuming** is doing a lot of work -- it's not necessarily saying "we are assuming that the height of males is _truly_ normally distributed", but rather "we assume that the normal distribution is an appropriate model for our analyses such that the  differences between real life and our model are insignificant for the outcomes of our analyses". 

We make assumptions because we must and we make assumptions because in many cases the answers we seek are appropriately answered even though our models simplify reality.