4 ms·
That's because you need to know that there are ~20 million veterans and ~1.87 million elementary school teachers, i.e. you need to know the base rate if I'm rev
by Natsu 7y ago
That's because you need to know that there are ~20 million veterans and ~1.87 million elementary school teachers, i.e. you need to know the base rate if I'm reversing the calculations properly.
Another flaw of averages is apparent when you realize that the average person has less than two eyes.
- noizejoy 7y agoAnd half of the population is dumber than the average. :-)
- MR4D 7y agoShouldn't it be: Half of the population is dumber than the median. ??
- Natsu 7y agoThis is true by default, the other depends on the distribution.
- the8472 7y agoSince intelligence must be a one-sided distribution it's probably right-tailed, which means the mean is higher than the median. So I expect (slightly) more than half of the population to be dumber than average.
- alasdair_ 7y ago>Since intelligence must be a one-sided distribution it's probably right-tailed, which means the mean is higher than the median. There are a lot of people with physical injuries or disabilities that skew things to the left.
- the8472 7y agoThose are all small, independent random contributions that naively would lead to a normal distribution per the central limit theorem. But it can't be quite a normal distribution due to the lower bound of 0 (in terms of absolute intelligence, not IQ). A better candidate would be a log-normal distribution which is always right-skewed.
- blululu 7y agoYes, it should be median though the original is true for symmetric distributions. If you apply the central limit theorem, then you could say that half of all randomly samplings of a population are, on average, dumber than the population's average.
- alasdair_ 7y ago>Shouldn't it be: >Half of the population is dumber than the median. >?? Probably not. Imagine a population of three people. The middle person is not dumber than themselves.
- saagarjha 7y agoThat’s a very small population.
- dragonwriter 7y agoAt least 50% must be at or under the median. Exactly half under is correct only for if none is exactly at the median, which requires (but is not necessarily the case when) there are an even number of measures.
- saagarjha 7y agoThe median is one measure of central tendency, though less commonly used than the mean when referring to “average”.
- dragonwriter 7y agoThe median is an average, one of many (though the most common thing people mean when they say “average” is “arithmetic mean”.)
- tgflynn 7y agoThat must mean that well over 10% of adult male (from the other statistic that 90% of veterans are male) Americans have served in the military. I never would have thought the number was that high, especially with the military being all volunteer for decades.
- battery_cowboy 7y agoThere are about 2mm active and reserve military members and about 400mm Americans on the whole, so there are, at any time, 0.5% Americans in the military. Assuming the average enlistment is 1 term or 4 years, and people have about 80 year lifespans, then you get ~20 (80/4) "generations" of enlistments over a person's lifespan. 20 * 0.5% is 10%, so about what you would expect for "living veterans" if you had a constant cycle of veterans through the system. That's serious back of the napkin math (lots of assumptions!), so it might be incorrect, but I think it shows that 10% isn't too far from what you might expect, right?
- philwelch 7y agoPlus the size of the military has been even higher within living memory.
- tgflynn 7y agoPossibly, though I would think that many who serve do more than 1 enlistment. It's just that from my own personal experiences I've encountered few veterans in my life (except for older generation family members who served in WWII), that's why intuitively I find the number a bit surprising.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> It's just that from my own personal experiences I've encountered few veterans in my life Lots of veterans don't advertise the fact that they are.