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Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici |
How difficult could this statement be to understand? 1/2 = 50%. Half of anything will be below average, because average is 50%. Intelligence, driving skill, etc, anything... Amazing how many times in response to this statement someone will weigh in with, "Oh, it's at least 80% that are below average". Sigh _________________________ NRA Endowment Member _________________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis | ||
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This Space for Rent |
When I graduated High School, I was in the top 98% of my class. I'z smart. We will never know world peace, until three people can simultaneously look each other straight in the eye Liberals are like pussycats and Twitter is Trump's laser pointer to keep them busy while he takes care of business - Rey HRH. | |||
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... the B team ...  | |||
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Member |
What this thread needs.  --------------------- DJT-45/47 MAGA !!!!! "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it." — Mark Twain “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” — H. L. Mencken | |||
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Fighting the good fight |
That's actually possible, if the upper 20% of the sample are drastically higher than the rest. Take for example a series of five numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 25 The average of these numbers is 7. Yet 80% of the numbers are below that average. This occurs because 25 is drastically higher than the other numbers, which skews the average upward. Similarly, if 80% of the sample were dumb and 20% of the population were very smart, with few people in-between, then it could be accurate to say that 80% of the people were below average intelligence. This concept works the other way around, too. Take another series of five numbers: 1, 32, 33, 34, and 35 The average of these numbers is 27. Yet 80% of our sample are above average. The fact that 1 is much smaller than the other numbers skews the average downward. You're also forgetting about situations in which something may be exactly average, neither above or below it. Here's yet another series of five numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 The average is 3. So 40% of the numbers are below average, 20% are average, and 40% are above average. It's not split with 50% below average and 50% above average.
Apparently it's not as easy as it seems.  | |||
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| Do the next right thing  |
Half of all people are below average intelligence. ...which is to say there are a lot of stupid people in this world, some of whom you may be acquainted with. | |||
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| Stumbling through where others have fallen  |
Yeah but a lot are educated beyond their intelligence. ________________________________________________ "Things are more the way they are today than they've ever been before" "I don't know a lot but I can zero beat the V's on an R390." | |||
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Almost as Fast as a Speeding Bullet |
Now I am going to preface this by saying it's been a loooong time since I had to worry about it, but you can have an "average" or "mean" and still have a majority "below average". The illustration would go something like this, let's say intelligence is measured on a 1-100 scale and you have a room with four extraordinarily stupid people (1's) and one genius (100). Their average intelligence is 20.8. So, you actually have 80% of the people in the room below average and 20% above. The median might be more what you are thinking as IIRC it is the mid-point of a set of numbers. Statisticians feel free to flay me alive. It's been a loooong time. Edited to add, I see RogueJSK beat me to the concept. ______________________________________________ Aeronautics confers beauty and grandeur, combining art and science for those who devote themselves to it. . . . The aeronaut, free in space, sailing in the infinite, loses himself in the immense undulations of nature. He climbs, he rises, he soars, he reigns, he hurtles the proud vault of the azure sky. — Georges Besançon | |||
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It appears someone's math skills are below average.  | |||
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| Banned |
I am working on being average in height. | |||
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Ammoholic |
With a statistically significant sample sample size you should end up with a bell curve. So in his post I assume it to mean all people, not a five person sample size. It is possible to get skewed with a small sample size or a bias/error in selection. But he is saying a sample size of all people. Mean of all people may not fall at 50%, but average will. Jesse Sic Semper Tyrannis | |||
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Lost |
The one I like is "Just because everybody is like that doesn't mean it's normal". | |||
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| Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici |
Thank you, Skins. Yes, always used in the most general sense of the population, not "half the people in this room are of below average intelligence" which would usually be patently untrue. I understand the point above, mean, median and average, but it is meant as skins says. Carlin was a gem. _________________________ NRA Endowment Member _________________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis | |||
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אַרְיֵה |
Which "average" are we talking about --
הרחפת שלי מלאה בצלופחים | |||
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A Grateful American |
I don't understand the question. "the meaning of life, is to give life meaning" ✡ Ani Yehudi אני יהודי Le'olam lo shuv לעולם לא שוב! | |||
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Intelligence is not a normal distribution. It is a type of chi squared distribution with k somewhere around 3 or 4. Basically, intelligence can't be lower than zero (despite how stupid some folks appear) but there is no theoretical limit to the upper end so it has a single tail. This changes the nature of the cumulative distribution. Regardless, in a sample large enough (99.9999% significance), the mean and the average will tend to converge and roughly half (population) will be below average/mean/median. Ken | |||
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My Doctor introduced me to this when he said "Half the doctors graduated in the bottom half of their class. I was in the top half." I'm sorry if I hurt you feelings when I called you stupid - I thought you already knew - Unknown ................................... When you have no future, you live in the past. " Sycamore Row" by John Grisham | |||
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As a cop, I was constantly amazed by people who outwardly appeared to be smart and successful, but were in fact quite stupid. That, combined with a lack of common sense often resulted in disaster. End of Earth: 2 Miles Upper Peninsula: 4 Miles | |||
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| Lost |
So true. Another thing I've noticed is that everyone thinks they're smart. Smart people think they're smart because they are; stupid people think they're smart because if they knew how stupid they were, they wouldn't be stupid. | |||
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| Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici |
^And they all think they are fabulous drivers. _________________________ NRA Endowment Member _________________________ "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis | |||
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