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"People’s appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they’re above avera
by GuiA 10y ago
"People’s appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they’re above average."
Well, the vast majority of people are actually above average drivers. If you got into 0 accidents over the past year, then you are doing better than average.
(Similarly, most people have more legs than the average human)
- spicyj 10y agoMost people also think they're a better-than-median driver.
- Chinjut 10y agoDepends on what sort of average. We might consider medians instead (with some way to make sense of these against the general backdrop of a non-continuous distribution).
- dwaltrip 10y agoThere are many factors other than the number of accidents that also contribute to driving skill. Now, if some holistic measure was also skewed in a similar fashion, you would still be correct. But that would require further analysis to demonstrate.
- cellularmitosis 10y agoSorry, I'm a little slow today. Can you elaborate on that last statement? Are you invoking a trick meaning to the word "average"?
- ajdlinux 10y agoThe average number of legs per human, worldwide, is slightly under 2. However, the vast majority of people have 2 legs.
- rfrey 10y agoSince some people have one leg, and some have none, but nobody has three legs, the average number of legs is slightly less than two.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- InclinedPlane 10y agoMost people (more than 50%) have an above average number of legs, arms, and eyes, but a below average number of nipples. This is because having more than 2 legs, arms, or eyes is exceedingly rare, whereas there's a small number of folks who have 1 or none, which brings the average below 2. Similarly, extra nipples are more common than losing a nipple. It's the difference between median/mode and mean.
- smallnamespace 10y ago'Most people' -> mode 'Average' -> Arithmetic mean Mode < Mean in this case because the distribution is skewed to the left https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skewness#Introduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skewness#Introduction
- bostonvaulter2 10y ago> "People’s appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they’re above average." My take on this is that most people DO have above average driving skills. However, that is using each persons INDIVIDUAL driving skills assessment criteria. So a cautious person would say that they are above average because they are cautious while driving. Similarly an impatient person would say that they are above average because they make turning decisions fast and don't waste other's time. So the corollary is that individual people see that nearly everyone else is a worse driver than them, because they have different value systems.