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Wouldn't you need the worse pilot you can get? Average doesn't account for the fact that 50% of the sample are WORSE.
by ohduran 7y ago
Wouldn't you need the worse pilot you can get? Average doesn't account for the fact that 50% of the sample are WORSE.
- ElonMuskrat 7y agoBut that's median not average...
- chrisseaton 7y agoI don’t know what you think ‘average’ means. Median is an average.
- Avalaxy 7y agoMost commonly it is used for the mean though...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Retric 7y agoLess than you might think. Mean is easier to calculate and tends to be close enough, but when there are are significant outliers people tend to revert to the median. Life expectancy for example is calculated via median. Median income is generally used over average etc.
- chrisseaton 7y agoMean wouldn’t make any sense in this context. Does a mean pilot even exist? Median pilots exist by definition.
- Avalaxy 7y agoIf you can order pilots by some quantifiable measure, you can also take the mean of that and select pilots that are exactly the mean or closests to the mean.
- ElonMuskrat 7y agohttps://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
- criley2 7y agoGiven set: 1 2 2 2 2 2 4 10 What's the average? 3.125 What's the median? 2
- wimagguc 7y agoMean is 3.125, median is 2, and mode is 2. All of those are averages.
- wimagguc 7y agoImagine the day you're hired to be a test pilot, and _officially_ graduate as the worst pilot there is!
- ohduran 7y agoimagine being the second to worst pilot, and not being hired at all.
- myself248 7y agoRobert Sheckley has a short story called The Minimum Man, which is about precisely this. An unlucky, clumsy, error-prone schlub who gets hired by basically-NASA for testing purposes. Turns out, when he's placed in a life-or-death situation, he finds some focus and skill, and is no longer the minimum man. So they have some ways to counter that tendency....
- jmkni 7y ago> So they have some ways to counter that tendency.... Alcohol?
- growlist 7y agoThat correlates with something interesting I learnt about leadership a while back - evidence shows that it's very hard to predict ahead of time whether someone will be a good leader from one context to another, with predicted good leaders often underperforming, and vice versa (might be a little out of date now).
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoWartime general vs. peacetime general is the classic example.
- ISL 7y agoIn times of crisis, we rarely rise to the occasion, but rather sink to the level of our training.
- api_or_ipa 7y agoI think a better term should be "minimally proficient pilot". One that passes all the requirements, but not by very much. That's the lowest common denominator you should be targeting for certification.