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> misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americ
by robomc 3y ago
> misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);
this one would be surprising though
- ls612 3y agoIntelligence doesn’t have much skewness in its distribution so the mean is approximately the median.
- nerdponx 3y agoRight, but that's less and assumption about basic statistical literacy than it is about a particular distribution that happens to describe the data. Many things in society and nature are not symmetric around their means.
- asynchronous 3y agoAlso a bad statistical statement, because the way it is phrased implies that the average is being taken from the whole world, rather than just America.