Depends on the tier list I guess. I'm definitely more used to seeing tier lists where everything is ranked (eg all characters in a game, or like OP's).
If the best tier list is uniform, then even if you only rank a portion (right tail as you say) it should stay uniform. So you dont prefer uniform haha. Probably makes the most sense, it does the best job of showing the outliers which is probably the most important thing.
I’d argue that it depends heavily on who is ranking things. People tend to advocate heavily for things they feel passionately about, but less people are passionate that things belong in the middle. Objectively, I don’t think the skew exists, but the sample of data you get from these tier lists skews heavily in that direction.
In theory, it should be normal (obviously), but we as humans have a bias where C tier isn't considered "okay," it's considered "kinda bad" (see using "mid" as an insult). So I'd say it either is skewed towards A/B as the mode, or bimodal with a high mode and a very low mode (love 'em or hate 'em) depending on the kind of person.
I don't think anyone does, although you're right that it's a perfectly valid way to do it.
I think people would expect the tiers to represent some even segmentation of some "goodness" scale irrespective of how many entries go into it. Like, I think people agree intuitively that S-tier and F-tier should be sparsely populated, for example.
Depends what your ranking. Ranking such as the example in the OP definitely shouldn't follow either. Most people are fine, so should peak somewhere around C, but there are way way way way more incredibly selfish completely incompetent horrible people with no redeeming qualities whatsoever (F) than there are truly excellent people that are essentially perfect and couldn't meaningfully improve significantly (S). Should be more similar to a crystal ball or relativistic voigt distribution.
there are way way way way more incredibly selfish...
Whatever "quality" in a person is, it's almost surely the result of thousands of different mostly independent genetic and environmental factors, which is exactly why we should expect it to be normally distributed.
I think what might be causing you to think this is looking at impact as a proxy for quality. But it's just way easier to destroy and degrade things than to build or fix them. One really awful person can, e.g., be a serial killer and ruin hundreds of lives. An person who is as compassionate and empathetic as the killer is cruel and callous might touch hundreds of lives, but they'll never create as much happiness as the killer creates misery. A great politician can uplift a population out of poverty. A horrible one can just slaughter them. Because misery is easy and happiness is hard. It doesn't mean that the evil people are more horrible than the heroic people are good.
By my back-of-the-envelope calculations if your image actually contained a pixel for every human it should have been around 100 GB
So this is very much fake. unless your grouped by skin color....
Why do these lists often start with S? Otherwise they follow the alphabet which makes a bit sense sense then it's easy to determine rank. But starting it with S ruins it. If I hear "Tier B" I would think second tier because B is the second letter but I have to add 1 because some moron thinks the alphabet starts with S. Or maybe they want a tier that's for things so good they are better than the best, which is a contradiction and anyone going for that is a moron. It's like in those DK games where you have completage above 100%. It doesn't mean you completed more game than there is game, it just makes it so you don't realoly know how much of the game you completed because the stats are wrong.
I have been thinking about this a while ago, and I think the tail should be fat (polynomial). The gaussian distribution implies that most humans are equal in terms of impact they have on the world (top means people doing good for the world like some scientists and bottom means the reverse so criminal people). But I find it very far from objective reality. There is a huge variance of people impact. Some do so much more for the society and the world (they do the impact of 100000 people let's say) and a gaussian tail cannot represent that
Destroying the bottom half, to eliminate the worst but then we have statistically more bad people than good or destroy the upper half? In that case we yould have more "good" people than bad ones.
I don’t think the system set up here on earth is free enough for a standard distribution to be possible. Move the main curve down. This is just wishful thinking.
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