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But see, these aren't even reasonable measures. In the case of legs, there is a hard upper bound which changes the useful definition of average away from the me

But see, these aren't even reasonable measures. In the case of legs, there is a hard upper bound which changes the useful definition of average away from the mean. This is a fairly intuitive thing. Similarly with driving, a terrible measure is number of accidents per year/number of drivers that year. It just makes no sense, because it doesn't take into account the person's entire driving record. An intuitive measure might be how many accidents that person has been in total compared to the average number of accidents a driver has been in (of course, this makes people who have been hit by someone blowing a stop sign bad drivers, even though they had no major input to the accident... again intuitive, having this conversation with someone not well versed in stats will have this exception outed pretty quickly). Basically both of these measures being considered reasonable suggests people who think this don't really have the wherewithal (knowledge or expertise) of legs or accidents to properly assess what makes sense.

glenra 14y ago
Whether or not you take into account the entire driving record (which you arguably should not since people's driving ability changes over time), another relevant fact is that some people are unusually bad drivers - causing lots and lots of accidents or near-accidents all the time. The few drivers who are actively a menace to everyone else make the rest of us look good by comparison. There's an upper limit on how good a driver you can be and most drivers aren't terribly far from that limit - they know their abilities and drive within them most of the time. But there's no strong lower limit on how bad a driver you can be. So we all grok intuitively that a few people who are drunk, high, angry, near-blind, aggressive or just terribly lacking in judgement are way over there on the other side of the driving-well scale from us; that makes us "above average drivers".
- sophacles 14y ago
  Actually by your argument, there is a strong upper bound. Therefore, by basic statistics reasoning, the mean is no longer a remotely valid measure of "average" - mode is much better in this case. Therefore average still constitutes most people. If you strictly are defining "average" to be mean, then sure, everyone is an above mean driver, however if you take average to be defined in a way statistically relevant, then it means "the measure of population that encompasses most of the population - the typical value of the population". (hint, if it is the typical value, most people can't be better than typical, it is definitionally impossible). Basically, I'm taking the long way of telling you to stop being disingenuous if you want to make an argument.

glenra 14y ago

Whether or not you take into account the entire driving record (which you arguably should not since people's driving ability changes over time), another relevant fact is that some people are unusually bad drivers - causing lots and lots of accidents or near-accidents all the time. The few drivers who are actively a menace to everyone else make the rest of us look good by comparison. There's an upper limit on how good a driver you can be and most drivers aren't terribly far from that limit - they know their abilities and drive within them most of the time. But there's no strong lower limit on how bad a driver you can be. So we all grok intuitively that a few people who are drunk, high, angry, near-blind, aggressive or just terribly lacking in judgement are way over there on the other side of the driving-well scale from us; that makes us "above average drivers".

sophacles 14y ago
Actually by your argument, there is a strong upper bound. Therefore, by basic statistics reasoning, the mean is no longer a remotely valid measure of "average" - mode is much better in this case. Therefore average still constitutes most people. If you strictly are defining "average" to be mean, then sure, everyone is an above mean driver, however if you take average to be defined in a way statistically relevant, then it means "the measure of population that encompasses most of the population - the typical value of the population". (hint, if it is the typical value, most people can't be better than typical, it is definitionally impossible). Basically, I'm taking the long way of telling you to stop being disingenuous if you want to make an argument.