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Than Average
- dmitryminkovsky 5y ago> 50% of participants also think they ponder their own mortality more than average.
- HDMI_Cable 5y ago> 23% of people say they're less smart than average [Paraphrasing]. That's interesting. Most of the other ones sit somewhere in the 40%-60%, but this is the only one I've seen where most people pick the "good" trait over the bad to such a high degree. I guess this says something about Hacker News.
- dalmo3 5y agoNew idea: this same questionnaire, but all questions ending in "average HN user".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jjulius 5y agoForgive my ignorance - why wouldn't, "I'm average," not be an option? For multiple questions, I found myself feeling neither more nor less than average.
- Nevermark 5y agoAlso things like “better partner” are so conditional on who you partner with that a simple general better vs. worse decision seems impossible to answer in a meaningful way.
- sudosysgen 5y agoMaybe choosing a partner that will be happy with you is also part of being a good partner?
- paxys 5y agoThe problem with having such options in surveys is that everyone then picks it, even though it is statistically unlikely. So better to force them to make a decision instead.
- jagger27 5y agoI think four bins of below average, slightly below average, slightly above average, and above average would be reasonable. It would show how many people think they fit into the interquartile range versus the extremities.
- globular-toast 5y agoBut then it will just take longer. You'll still have to pick which side of the average you're on, plus how extreme (or maybe you'll just never pick the extreme).
- imtringued 5y agoI gave up at question 60 because it was taking too long.
- nerdponx 5y agoThis. I closed out of the quiz when I saw that I couldn't answer "close to average, and without enough certainty or precision to guess above or below".
- the_only_law 5y agoI have the same issue with most of the popular personality tests. Many of my responses are either extremely neutral or could wildly swing depending on the week, month, year, etc.
- spoonjim 5y agoFor a continuously measured variable like height or attractiveness or curiosity measured at arbitrary precision, your probability of being average is 0.
- slver 5y ago> measured at arbitrary precision, your probability of being average is 0 You're talking about a site that currently measures with precision of 1 bit, in which case your probability of being average is basically 100% comparing to either extreme.
- Bancakes 5y agoAverage being -1 to 1 sigma, most people are just average.
- anonytrary 5y agoIf you force someone, you truly measure them.
- kqr 5y agoThink of it as a bet. There's no harm in picking either above or below average when you're uncertain into which bin you'll fall, because those cases will even out in the end anyway. Sometimes you'll chose "below average" and actually be 0.1 standard deviations above average. Others will be the other way around, but for your return on investment those cases are not the ones that matter. In fact, if there was a third "within +-0.3 standard deviations of average" you would probably be unwise to pick it, simply because "below average" has a greater expected value due to covering more of the range of possibilities, even when it's only true 50 % of the time. Besides, being forced to really try to sense which way one leans is informative!
- distrill 5y agoThe first question I got already gives me pause: > Do you have a better music taste than average? What does this even mean? How can an opinion be averaged?
- kristopolous 5y agoThe entire exercise is an inversion. It's really asking you about confidence and insecurities
- vineyardmike 5y agoyou're not averaging actual numbers, its just "X than the average person"
- distrill 5y agoRight, but comparing opinions in the first place is odd. Is this concept more common than I'm giving credit for? I would assume that everyone thinks they have the best taste in music - if they like something better that would be their taste in music.
- pjerem 5y agoNo doubt mine is best ;)
- vineyardmike 5y agoYeah i think you're just missing something here. Its pretty common for people to compare themselves to others like this. Not all of the questions are equally qualitative. Some are "i give more money to the homeless than average". You could theoretically measure this. The purpose is probably just to understand peoples perceptions of themselves. (For example), i think i have better than average taste in music... after all, i meet artists and spend my free time going though new albums to find the next needle in a haystack.
- inimino 5y agoYou don't need to average opinions. Just imagine you pick a person at random from your peer group and ask yourself how likely it is that you have better taste in music than that person.
- chrisallick 5y agofantastic design
- axaxs 5y agoI'm impressed with how honest people are. Most answers were in the 40 to 60 percent range, which is about where it should be mathematically of course. Two big outliers I saw was that apparently everyone thinks they have more common sense than average, and also more polite than average.
- mathattack 5y agoMost people think they are better drivers than average.
- jedberg 5y agoRight, but some of us know we are. :)
- jedberg 5y ago77% think they are smarter than average.
- mateo411 5y agoThat's part of the Lake Woebegone effect. For me it's different, I think I'm smarter than average 77% of the time.
- Nevermark 5y agoI believe in this. Smarts are more like a distribution curve, even in a single individual. There are areas I am in the 1 percentile, I think I can say without exaggeration. Those areas I seem to have insights in without effort, coupled with thousands of hours of focus. But I experience a high cost of many things I do very very badly compared to almost EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know. I am not alone in this assessment of myself. Friends & family all agree. My many areas of remarkable incompetence, besides occasionally causing me great shame, make it very clear to me that everyone I know or meet has something to offer, at least to me!
- serf 5y agoon Firefox 88/Windows there seems to be a bug where the 'crowd' isn't re-flowed after window changes size, but the fonts/ui ARE being reflowed. This leads to a issue where the 'crowd' may sit over the buttons and make the UI unusable.
- edgyquant 5y agoOn Safari/iOS I can’t read the questions because the crowd is over a few words on each one
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoWhile I realize the purpose is to force a choice, I'd be interested to see the results if there was an "I don't know" option. There were some questions where I'm very confident that I'm above/below average, and others where I basically have no idea, but I had to pick something.
- Erik816 5y agoOnly 19% think they are more religious than average. I find that very interesting. Not sure if it's an artifact of the kind of people who have taken the survey so far, a statement about how people want to be perceived in our culture, or a bit of both.
- Armisael16 5y agoTheoretically it could also reflect the society. If 80% of people aren’t religious at all, then at most 20% are more religious than average.
- Erik816 5y agoIt's been a while since this was updated (2014), but it indicates that over 50% of people consider religion "very important" in their life. Only 11% said religion was "not at all important." So while you could imagine a society where 80% of people believe they aren't religious at all, the United States at least does not appear anywhere near that number. https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/importance-of-religion-in-ones-life/ https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/importanc...
- Armisael16 5y agoIs this website primarily polling Americans? (You’re probably right anyways - there’s a reason I put ‘theoretically’ at the beginning of my first post)
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Not sure if it's an artifact of the kind of people who have taken the survey so far, a statement about how people want to be perceived in our culture, or a bit of both. It could also be that the (loose, intuitively approximated) mode on some level of granularity (the individual category perceived as most commonly seen) rather than the median is going to frequently be the intuitive yardstick for “average”, rather than median (mean of a ordinal categorical trait with no unique obvious reduction to an interval-level measure has no coherent definition, so its not really a candidate average.)
- gault8121 5y agoIt would be helpful if the site could define what they mean by the average. The average visitor to the website thanaverage.xyz? The average American? the average person around the world? It seems like it would be more interesting to make a guess about the average visitor to the website, but it's not clear if that's the case or not. Compared to the average American or the world, the numbers for this small segment of people who would visit this website would not reflect the average.
- LeoPanthera 5y agoBut it does define. "Imagine you are in a room with 100 strangers, Imagine they're similar to your peers and neighbours."
- paxys 5y agoBut then aggregating the results together doesn't really mean anything. 100% of responses could be "I am more XYZ than average" and they could all be correct.
- robot_no_419 5y agoIn the "about" section of the webpage: "ThanAverage is a small unscientific investigation into how we value and compare ourselves to each other." It's just a fun website... don't think too much about it.
- jedberg 5y agoI wonder how much of the results reflects the biased group that is answering the questions. For example, 75% said they were more privileged when I looked, but if they are all coming from sites like this and have good jobs, that might be quite reasonable.
- bmmayer1 5y agoImportant to realize that the average taker of this survey is likely nowhere close to the average person on quite a few of these qualities, or even the average internet user. It's going to skew more tech savvy / progressive / intelligent / etc -- the Hacker News bump alone renders the "insights" you might glean from the results almost meaningless. For example, that 76% of takers think they are more privileged than average is probably an underestimate, not an overestimate as you would first believe...
- LeoPanthera 5y agoIt asks you to compare yourself to your peers, not to the global population, so the results should still be close to 50%, even if it does say "average" and not "median".
- lainga 5y agoYou aren't my peers, guy!
- re 5y agoMost of the people who I imagine to be my "peers and neighbors" probably wouldn't visit a site like this or spend as much time on Hacker News as me.
- paxys 5y agoI don't personally consider "HN readers with tech jobs" to be my peers. I'd instead pick my friends, family, coworkers and extended social circle.
- alexpetralia 5y agoThere must be a term for this, but I imagine no one is average across all attributes. Curse of dimensionality maybe?
- blueblimp 5y agoI don’t know a term for it, but here's a relevant blog post: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-normal-shell/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-norma... > For a multivariate normal distribution in high dimensions, nearly all the probability mass is concentrated in a thin shell some distance away from the origin.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwawaysea 5y agoThe one question I saw 50% on was asking people if they were better or worse looking than average. The most skewed questions/answers were people saying they were more perceptive, lie less, are more liberal, and give less to the homeless than the averages. EDIT: you can see the full list of questions and answers as well, and it’s more interesting than just what I wrote above.
- kristopolous 5y agoSo people are insecure about dancing and sex. This all tracks. I wonder if and how things cluster around age, income, country of residence, etc. What I'd really be interested in is a set of tags people can click as far as "which of these do you strongly identify with?" And then just have some broad categories that are ostensibly independent such as "investing", "politics", "exercise & fitness", "video or board games", "charity/volunteering", "night clubs/partying", "theater & the arts", "sci-fi or fantasy", "religion", "travelling/siteseeing", "meditation" ... I'd assume most to be total noise but there may be a few interesting strong correlations that could inspire further study.
- manwe150 5y agoAh, this feels interesting. I would have said I’m a below average dancer, but above average person at dancing. The difference being whether I compare to people who I observe dancing, or consider everyone. Differently for sex, I assume that this is possibly bimodal (none versus some), so this could provide a measure of the actual skew in the underlying distribution (difference between mean and median) and not only the perception of bias.
- stared 5y agoWhen it comes to sex, technically it is likely to be correct. It is a long tail distribution (see e.g. https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/david-spiegelhalter-sex-by-numbers-review-masturbation-sti-homosexuality-virginity-marriage https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/david-spiegelhalter-se...). When we take the average, not median - most people land below the average.. Moreover, if you ask your sex partners on the number of partners they have had, on the average their number is higher than yours. Again, it is not that you are a loser - it's the friendship paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox.
- samatman 5y agoNot necessarily. It's the average of people playing the game, not reporting on some survey. I saw better than average at maths around 68%... and that might be true for the kind of people who play this game. Dancing and sex might be the same story (didn't see those questions).
- paxys 5y agoLots of bias in the sample set. I'm pretty sure I'm less religious, more privileged, better with technology, more liberal etc. than the average American (or even my friends, family, neighbors), but probably not so compared to the average HN reader who took the survey.
- montenegrohugo 5y ago> 81% of participants think they are a worse dancer than average. Made me laugh. Obviously skewed demographics, but entertaining nonetheless.
- aflag 5y agoIt's missing the "about average" option. Many of the questions I'd like to say that I'm about average, I think. Like, for instance, I think I'm an about average driver and I think I'm about average when it comes to optimism.
- dokem 5y agoThe 'confidence' question was hard to answer. In some areas I am confident, in others not so much. I think most people are like that. There were a few other questions that I found hard to answer as yes or no. Or maybe I am misunderstanding confidence or don't want to see myself as lacking confidence.
- smogcutter 5y agoI wonder what HN's result would be for "I am more/less likely to rush to HN to post banalities about the survey sample"
- dang 5y ago"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That guideline is not there because we don't know how annoying HN comments can be, but because we do know. Reacting by adding snark or denunciation to the threads just makes things even worse. The only response that really helps, in reaction to bad or unsubstantive or obvious comments, is to post good, substantive, non-obvious ones.
- noduerme 5y agoI wish I had seen the deleted comment. My take was obvious, but it was intended as a compliment to the creator of the piece, not to incite argument. Still, I'm curious to know why I got trolled for it.
- aazaa 5y agoThere may be a reverse-Woebegone effect operating here that tends to make people answer something other than what they might initially think. Maybe that's the point.
- arduinomancer 5y ago"75% of participants think they have fewer friends than average." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox
- z77dj3kl 5y agoThe Friendship paradox has nothing to do with what people think: it's an observed fact and related to the way that node degree in social graphs work (or random graphs in general).
- GuB-42 5y agoI think it can apply to skills. For example, if you go to a gym, you are probably among the weakest in the room. Simply because the strongest are more likely to be those who go to the gym the most and therefore, the ones you are most likely to encounter. If you hit the dance floor, the same happens, and as expected, most people think they are below average dancers. In fact, the worst dancers may not dance at all, so you can't compare yourself to them.
- jcahill84 5y agoThis is amazing. We’ll done.
- sethc2 5y agoThese questions and some of the percentages really makes me wish I could see what other people think average is. It would be interesting to see how often those who are actually less than average said they were more and vice versa.
- z77dj3kl 5y agoThis would be more fun if this could be done with the median. Then the "true" answer to any question would be 50% on both sides. (For example, more than 50% of people have a lower income than the mean income, due to extreme outliers.) I suppose in lay language the distinction gets muddled.
- GuB-42 5y ago> 70% of participants think they procrastinate more than average. This is what I call selection bias.
- crazygringo 5y ago> Are you better at washing up dishes than average? What does that... even mean? That I do it more often? More often than my partner? More quickly? More sanitarily? I never in my life thought washing dishes was something you could be better or worse at, any more than tying your shoes... I'm guessing other people are confused as well and just answering randomly because it's the only question I've seen with a perfect 50% split.
- nimih 5y agoSometimes when I go to a friend's house, they have dishes in their sink that have obviously been there for a number of days. Conversely, I have had roommates who will cook a complex meal, dirtying many dishes in the process, but still have very little cleanup after the meal because they clean efficiently as they go (a practice I try to emulate to varying success). I would say the former group is not very good at washing up their dishes, while the latter is (from my own observations, at least) better than average. edit: this is also one of the easier questions to actually have a good sense of where you stand. I don't know how often most of my peers cry, for instance, but I do know how often I visit someone's house and they have dirty dishes lying around, or they leave dishes from a dinner party or get-together in the sink for the next morning, etc.
- variaga 5y agoSummers during college, I worked as staff at a summer camp, where part of the "camp experience" was that the kids got to (had to) help wash the dishes are meals. This was usually done by a rota, so a different subset (4 to 5) of the campers (mostly 6-12th grade, but there were adult camps too) helped after each meal, and the staff took turns supervising this. As such, over the course of a few summers, I have watched 100s (18 meals/week, 10 weeks/ yr, 3 years) of discrete groups of people of varying ages "wash" dishes and can confirm that there is a wide range of dishwashing skills across the following criteria: - cleanliness (what % of dishes had to be sent back for rewashing because they were too dirty for the sterilizer) - speed (fast groups would be done in 20-25 minutes. Slow ones could take an hour+, mostly because they would spend time complaining or arguing rather than actually washing anything) - how much of a mess was made (sink water splashed on the floor, mostly) during the cleaning progress And our dishes were unbreakable, but if they hadn't been, I'm sure "breakage" would have been a metric too.
- efficax 5y agoWhy can't I answer that I'm the same as the average
- geraneum 5y agoI think this experiment is about perception rather than finding the true statistical average. The sample space might not be balanced for studying poverty, intelligence, relationships, etc. but I believe that's not the point here. The test is trying to show you how is your perception of yourself compared to others who participated. Take for example this question: "Are you smarter than average?" and (last time I checked) 72% think they are. Just imagine how the distribution looks like. By comparing this number to the IQ distribution (assuming correlation) which is a normal distribution, you could infer that either [0] a sizable portion of participants are wrong about how smart they are, [1] the sample size is too small, or [2] the people who've landed on the page are exceptionally smart! [0] I have a "feeling" that this is the case! [1] Maybe this can be taken into account with better statistical analysis. [2] The assumption of participants coming mostly from HN, does not prove that this is the case.
- LASR 5y agoYes. But isn’t this point obvious? There is no mathematical way to determine the true average of anything unless if there is some true measure that exists outside of perception. So regardless of the sample size, you will never arrive at any true measure, unless if that measure is of the perception of self, on average. Which is what this experiment is doing, as you’ve stated.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- strken 5y agoThere's probably a bias towards sightly higher than average IQ, because extremely low IQ usually means intellectual disability, and because IQ correlates with the ability to apply effort (at least at lower IQs). I also suspect but have no evidence that low IQ users tend to stay within walled gardens like Facebook more. I think a lot of HN would be surprised at what an IQ of 100 looks like.
- robot_no_419 5y ago"Is your salary higher than the average salary" and "Is your salary higher than the average person's salary" are two different questions when you think about it. I interpreted all of these questions more along the lines of the second example, which meant I was basically using medians and not means.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jankassens 5y agoI have an above average number of hands: 2 (like most people) Or in other words, it’s not contradicting if you’re in a 70% group of people who said some answer.
- prvc 5y agoThe flaw in this survey is that they do not specify what type of average they are referring to.
- beervirus 5y agoAverage = mean.
- DoreenMichele 5y agoNo, it can mean: Mean, mode or median. These are mathematically distinct figures and they can be extremely different numbers.
- stonewareslord 5y agoThe mean, median, and mode are distinct, but mean is the average. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean which says: > In descriptive statistics, the mean may be confused with the median, mode or mid-range, as any of these may be called an "average" (more formally, a measure of central tendency). The mean of a set of observations is the arithmetic average of the values...
- dragonwriter 5y ago“the mean is the arithmetic average” is nonsense verbiage. “The mean” isn’t even well defined, there are a number of different means.
- stonewareslord 5y ago
- baron816 5y agoI’m betting the results will be skewed by being posted here and being on the front page. HN can produce a lot of traffic, but doesn’t represent a good sample of the population.
- raldi 5y agoShould be pretty easy for the site owner to analyze that.
- moralestapia 5y agoSo sad, pretty much all the comments in this thread are "it would be better if ...", "I think that ...", "I don't think that ..." Well, this is your chance then, buy a domain name and set up your website, shows us how much better you can do it, or, you know, just shut up. I personally found the site amusing and interesting, I'd love to come back and check the statistics once a lot of people have gone through it and the sample size becomes significant. Props to the authors for developing their idea and delivering it to the world in such a simple way that I only had to click a few times to play with it, for free :D.
- geniium 5y ago43% of the people here thought the same, that negative criticism should not be shared here. There is always room for feedback, but please make it constructive.
- vladmk 5y ago100% of me disagrees with you, it was constructive he just wasn’t nice about it, there’s a difference.
- purplecats 5y ago"I don't think that" just because someone has an opinion that varies with that of the author, that they necessarily should try to outdo them.
- andrewzah 5y agoI think what parent is getting at is that criticism and nitpicking take no effort. Obviously that's not to say nothing should be criticized. There's a similar, ruder, expression in fashion communities: talk shit, post fit.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago> criticism and nitpicking take no effort Sort of unrelated aside. I recently started working with a new company and team, in a new ecosystem. I’ve found it difficult to ramp up and get productive. But the thing I’ve found most difficult is getting familiar enough to provide meaningful review. It can take me hours of exploration to fully understand what might intersect with single line code changes. Often I’ve come back with a minor change request, even simply for clarity. Where it relates is obviously these things are critique, but even picking nits has been hard. Not that I’m even predisposed to do so, but I’m trying to get familiar and provide value. It turns out that effort has indeed provided value, I’ve caught mistakes just by being thorough and leaving as few stones unturned as possible. And it’s reinforced to me that criticism and nitpicking take a lot more effort than might be obvious. Sometimes it’s quickly available based on experience, but even then that’s based on prior effort. I’m not saying it’s always welcome or appropriate. But it’s surprising to me to hear people seemingly reflexively say it’s easy. A whole discipline (QA) is dedicated to it, and integrated disciplines (TDD, property testing) are still suspect for many. Again, not saying it’s welcome or appropriate here to criticize or nitpick. I’m holding my tongue on several bits of feedback I wanted to say upon using the thing. But I think it’s a disservice to both the effort and value of critique to frame it as effortless and implicitly valueless.
- noduerme 5y agoThis is cool. I adore the animation. I think you can tell how the data's a bit skewed by the HN audience so far as a result of 79% thinking they're more progressive than average. That question doesn't have the same type of subjectivity as how you smell, for instance, because anyone who's progressive at all in some way can correctly answer yes to it.
- cortesoft 5y agoA remarkable number of them were around 50%. I guess we know ourselves pretty well! Although I wonder how many of those people are wrong, just counterbalanced by the other side also being wrong....
- BugsJustFindMe 5y agoAnd the rest show a humorous bias, like "75% say they are less conservative than average".
- midasuni 5y agoAssuming majority of inputs are from HN, that makes sense. HN demographic is higher education level and younger than a given average population, two demographics that correlate to “not conservative”
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- slver 5y ago> HN demographic is higher education level "Do you believe the sites you frequent are visited by higher educated, more intelligent people than average" Nervous shuffling of little green ghosts to the left.
- midasuni 5y agoI believe this site’s main referer is HN I believe HN is mostly working age English speaking computer professionals - especially American software engineers I believe that American software engineers are broadly educated to an above average level
- snet0 5y agoThis could be truthful if there is a biased data source.
- vmception 5y agoOne of the main things I like about Quantic games (Detroit Become Human, Heavy Rain, Until Dawn) is the world stats that show what other people chose by % and how that matches the choices you made in the game Its like reading Choose your own adventure Goosebumps books and seeing how many other people chose that adventure
- joshka 5y agoWhile not exactly what the article is suggesting, a fun thing to know is that in a room of 100 people, with normally distributed IQs. If you want to have a 50% chance of being correct that you have a higher IQ than everyone in the room, you need an IQ of about 136.9.
- maydup-nem 5y agoWhy, is it so fucking hard to place 101 points to be able to pinpoint where exactly you stand (and then show a graph of responses), instead of this beaten-to-death-horse more/less than average trickery (probably done solely for some BS psychology paper)?
- yreg 5y agoWow you got angry. This is not a tone people expect on this forum. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- maydup-nem 5y agoNo, I wasn't angry, even though I can see how that could come off as such. But I do feel like it's yet another highly-upvoted time waster with no substance to it on the front page.
- voxelc4L 5y agoIs the population that visits your website more biased than average?
- J_cst 5y agoHumble suggestion to a great project: I'd put a different colour to a single 'person' of the crowd so to represent the user and to highlight in which group he is fallen. That changes for each answer obviously. Kudos for shipping this nice project.
- yreg 5y agoI'd love for this to have rooms. Your answers could still count toward the global stats, but you would compare only with the group where it was shared. I'd like to try these questions out in my friend circles (anonymously). Although obviously the results would have to be delivered afterward, since initially there's no baseline.
- dorgo 5y agoIt should be a game. Try to hit the center. 2 points for 45%-55%, 1 point for 35%-65%. And the last question should be: Do you think your score will be better than the average?
- huhtenberg 5y agoThere's a good if a silly factiod in a similar vein - More likely than not you have more hands than an average human. That's because the average hand count is a bit under 2.
- isoprophlex 5y ago... thus highlighting that sometimes you really need the median instead of the mean to describe something
- periheli0n 5y agoExpected value and 95% confidence interval is my favourite. Or just the confidence interval.
- the8472 5y agoOr don't waffle about which single value to show and print a histogram/violin/box plot instead.
- Nesco 5y agoThe answers only show how the HN crowds consider themselves. The significant deviations of the answers from 50% are ridiculously stereotypical from men in STEM: wealthier, more progressive, have less sex, dance worse, etc
- amelius 5y agoSome people have a strong desire to not be average, even if it means being far below average.
- yeahr4579 5y agoI mean your obviously right but I still think most of the massive deviations would still be there (like the lying one)
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y agoThere's no "I'm about average" option, so the results will tend to deviate from average more than they ought to.
- agersant 5y agoThis website has been making the rounds on social media for a few days - it's not just a HN sample. I agree it is still a heavily biased sample though.
- majani 5y agoThe answers are definitely mostly from redditors and guys from here (many of whom are also redditors)
- anonytrary 5y ago74% of participants also think they dream less while sleeping than average. 79% of participants also think they have sex less often than average. 82% of participants also think they are a worse dancer than average. 79% of participants also think they are more privileged than average. 79% of participants also think they are smarter than average. 78% of participants also think they are less extroverted than average. Things we readily admit together because it's funny and makes us seem more human, or likable in some way. 28% of participants also think they are less honest than average. 34% of participants also think they are less kind than average. 26% of participants also think they lie more than average. 31% of participants also think they had a worse childhood than average. 35% of participants also think they are more important than average. 29% of participants also think they are less progressive than average. 30% of participants also think they are less polite than average. 33% of participants also think they are worse at keeing secrets than average. Things most of you are afraid to admit because it makes you feel guilty of being a bad human.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- amai 5y ago80% think the selection bias of this website is worse than average.
- altcognito 5y agoWhat a great way to get personal ad information.
- JustFinishedBSG 5y agoJust a reminder for the readers: 1. Averages and medians have no reasons to be similar or even close. 2. "Averages" do NOT behave the same way at all in high dimension than intuition suggests. If you answer 100 questions it is expected that you will be an extreme outlier on specific dimensions even if you are average "globally". Not that the website argues otherwise mind you.
- amalcon 5y agoSome of these questions produce obviously weird responses. E.g.: > Do you have better music taste than average? Of course I do. Logically everyone should evaluate their own taste in music to be better than average, since your own music taste determines what you think constitutes good music taste. Somehow, only about half of respondents selected that option, though. That's interesting.
- mcBesse 5y ago> your own music taste determines what you think constitutes good music taste No, your own music taste determines what you think is good music. Taste is not about holding your own opinion higher than others', it's just about what you like or not. I still find it weird that it's a 50/50 split though. Maybe a lot of people aren't thinking so much about whose taste is better, but whose is more refined? Like how people who aren't into wine might not take their own lived experience as seriously as the words of an experienced sommelier?
- amalcon 5y agoIf that's how you interpret the question, then the whole concept of having "good" or "bad" taste is incoherent to begin with. If it's just your opinions on what you enjoy while not harming yourself or anyone else, then obviously nobody's taste can be better than that of anyone else. Granted, starting from this interpretation could easily lead people to interpret "good" as "refined"; I suppose that makes sense.
- splithalf 5y agoMany of us click randomly or invert our true response to throw off data collectors. This is pretty low stakes after all.
- cutups 5y agoI could imagine somebody who is pretty self aware could judge their taste in music to be worse than average, if they really only ever buy music from artists that they are later embarrassed by. But in general, I think this would skew towards people having the preference for their preference.
- asoylu 5y agoReminded me Tom Scott's video on his survey with similar question and interesting interpretations: https://youtu.be/dcuNq3Bw9Xs https://youtu.be/dcuNq3Bw9Xs
- cutups 5y agoWent through these, and I wish I had an "about average" response for many of them. Pleasant interface for this sort of thing!
- xtat 5y agoThis exact thing is in my idea file :D
- ElectricMind 5y agoRemember from somewhere : "You are never as good as they think you are OR You are never as bad as they think you are" Good day !