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This reveals itself with the Carlin joke about the average person being dumb and that by implication 1/2 of the population is even dumber. Carlin and people who
by bigmattystyles 4y ago
This reveals itself with the Carlin joke about the average person being dumb and that by implication 1/2 of the population is even dumber. Carlin and people who eagerly repeat it don’t know about distributions and that intelligence is not a standard distribution. Mea culpa, I used to parrot and believe the joke…
- programmer_dude 4y agoThe median is also an average.
- bigmattystyles 4y agoOnly in a standard distribution right?
- nostromo95 4y agoAny symmetrical distribution will have the mean equal the median.
- bigmattystyles 4y agoBut that’s the definition of a standard distribution? Intelligence is not, at least I think.
- nostromo95 4y agoAFAIK "standard distribution" is not a defined mathematical term; usually it's shorthand for standard normal distribution. Can't comment on intelligence distributions.
- ackfoobar 4y ago"standard normal distribution" is a normal distribution with mean 0 and s.d. 1. To talk about whether intelligence follows a (one-dimensional) normal distribution we have to assign a number to it. That number is usually IQ, but by design the raw score is transformed to make IQ scores follow a normal distribution. So it is trivially true. If we want to go beyond that, what does it even mean to say, for example, "twice as smart"?
- ackfoobar 4y agoNot exactly. This pathological distribution has no mean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_distribution
- nostromo95 4y agoYou got me—funny thing is I took a couple analysis courses in school so I should have been more careful making such a strong statement.
- programmer_dude 4y agoNo, the word average is a place holder for measures of central tendencies (like mean, median and mode).
- hodgesrm 4y agoI suspect Carlin understood averages and the diversity of intelligence better than your comment implies. He probably was just having fun with the idea. After all, it is a good joke.
- samatman 4y agoIntelligence, as measured, shows a normal distribution. Just like height, grip strength, BMI, and many other human metrics. Hence the name of a rather notorious book by Charles Murray.