5 ms·
Half of any population is below average on any (and every!) metric. That's why they call it an average. Right?
by crgt 13y ago
Half of any population is below average on any (and every!) metric. That's why they call it an average. Right?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- danmaz74 13y agoActually, wrong: that's called the median (they are the same for distributions which are symmetric around the average like the normale distribution, but not in the general case) EDIT: not "only" symmetric
- talaketu 13y ago(not necessarily symmetric)
- danmaz74 13y agoYou're right... fixed
- foobarbazqux 13y agoUsually the word average means arithmetic mean, but the median is also an average. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
- crgt 13y agoActually, average can mean median, mode or mean. I was using (I thought obviously..but perhaps not) the median definition. The point stands - it's odd to say that the problem here is that half the people are of below average intelligence. Since that's (roughly) what you'd expect. The problem instead is that our "rights" are treated as privileges that can be revoked when the powers that be deem it convenient. Our rights should be rights regardless of our intelligence. Though perhaps the responsibility for securing those rights falls most heavily upon the cleverest among us..in which case the problem isn't that there are folks of below average intelligence, it's that those particularly blessed with keen minds aren't doing enough to defend the rights of us all.
- danmaz74 13y agoOk, sorry - I just learned that average is used as a synonym for arithmetic mean only in "colloquial language" - I thought it was actually a synonym (probably because in my mother language average is translated to the the word "media", that is "mean"). My mistake.
- jlgreco 13y agoAll modern IQ tests that I am aware of have normal distributions (ie, the mean, median, and mode are all the same) by design. If one of several IQ measures is not your cup of tea for scoring mental ability, that is fine, but I highly suspect that whatever you pick instead will also have a normal distribution.
- coldtea 13y agoNot really. Perhaps you have confused different methods of "averaging" (average, mean, etc). Imagine an "education" scale of 1-20. If you have 3 persons with 12 and one with 20, then the average is 14 -- and you have MORE than half of the people below average.
- ceejayoz 13y agoAnother example I've seen: the average wealth of a room with Bill Gates and a hundred homeless people is a couple hundred million dollars per capita.
- coldtea 13y agoAnd even the mean, if I am not mistaken, can be totally misleading. E.g you get a room with 51 millionaires and 49 homeless people. The mean value would be millions, but it's not exactly representative.
- colanderman 13y agoPresumably you mean "median" (i.e. the wealth of the poorest millionaire in your example).