Most people *can* be above average

By -
At least if the average of which we speak is the mean: "Consider the average number of legs for a human: it’s around 1.999. Almost everyone is above average and no one is average."

By the way, the quote is from a good article rejecting scientism.

Comments

  1. Greg Pandatshang6:33 PM

    Every time someone says "90% of drivers believe they are above average at driving!", I think ... well, that means between 33% and 44% of the people who believe that are right! Perhaps more than half of drivers are able to accurately assess whether they are above average.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah7:44 PM

      Well, I think your analysis is right, but if they are thinking of the mean, and 10% of drivers are REALLY terrible, 90% of drivers could be right!

      (I just note that's possible: I think you are correct, and most people overrate their driving skill.)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more