About 50% of people are below average
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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This cracks me up because it is often said with such confidence, but it is just wrong.
If you have 10 people, 8 have an intelligence score of 1, 1 has a score of 5 and 1 has a score of 10. The average is 2.3 which means that 80% of the people are below average.
The median is the only thing that is going to guarantee 50%.
On a bell curve the average and mean are the same. Your example isn't a bell curve. Many things will be a bell curve.
People who don't know that average can be mean, median or mode depending on the context crack me up.
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Yes, that statement is made under the assumption of large sample sizes (where the central limit theorem applies)
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Think about how dumb the average person is. And then remember that half of them are dumber than that!
Carlin was a prophet
But he was shit at statistics. He mixes up median and mean.
Statistically, IQ follows a standard distribution, so the median and mean should be relatively close.
And you lose most of the audience when discussing median, I'm guessing there was a conscious choice to sacrifice some accuracy for comedic value
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I guess the education system is really struggling ...
(Also his account is satire, right?)
Yes, he is the Congressman for California's 54th district (it only has 52, but was probably still 53 when he started the satire account).
Wow, at least 13 years. I remember coming across him when reddit was young: https://www.prwatch.org/spin/2010/09/9423/washington-post-duped-fake-congressman
oh thank christ
Err... im not sure everyone in this thread is getting the joke?
That the bottom 25% of scorers in standardized tests are in the bottom quartile of the distribution, which is literally defined as the bottom 25%, but the Twitter user seems to be using that fact to justify something yet he's literally just stating a fact?
The bottom 25% will always exist and there will always be 25% of the results contained within it.
Not sure how anyone doesn't get it, but this Twitter screenshot exists, so there's that.
Oh, sorry, this "x" exists. Dumb fucking name.
Am I misreading this or are you doubling down on not getting it’s satire?
I like you kid, you've got grit.
The twitter account is a satire account. They're trying to stir the pot.
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Small head: He’s proving his point really well.
Big head: He’s proving his point really well.
100% of people who have committed a murder have drunk DiHydrogen Monoxide within the last two weeks, do you feel safe giving this to your children?
But 25% of all American students also scored in the top quartile on standardized tests, so it cancels out!
Plus, it's amazing that every student at least got placed on the graph. Missing that would be shameful.
Just another example of those damn participation trophies.
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But at least the healthcare system is quite good: most people have more legs than average
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How astute. You're really top of the bell curve.
This is officially the second dumbest take on the value of a quarter.
I knew a person who thought quarter to six meant 5:35 because "how many cents in a quarter dumbass."
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Technically, if everyone gets the full mark, no one will be in the bottom quartile.
Also, everyone would be in the bottom quartile. The definitions fall apart when you collapse the probability function.
I’m overthinking this.
If everyone gets the full mark, it’s not a random variable anymore, you would have a collapse of the probability distribution, that would tend to a Dirac delta function. In this case, the very definition of “quartiles” would fail. So, yeah, there would be no one there because it wouldn’t exist.
If ever a reliable method for measuring actual intelligence rather than IQ is invented I imagine we'll be seeing a somewhat lumpier graph than that smooth mean distribution curve.
No, this is how a graph showing quartiles will always look because quartiles, by definition, always include a fixed percentage of the studied population under them.
In this case the lower quartile will always have 25% of the population under it, 50% under the second quartile, and 75% under the third quartile.
Quartiles break a population into 4 equal portions.
While that's true, the actual empirical curve does not have to be smooth. Or gaussian.
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At the end of the day, reducing intelligence down to one single number is already kind of questionable. What does it mean for someone to be 1 point more intelligent than another person?
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He couldn't be more right. Absolutely appalling.
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