Think of how stupid the average person is, then realise half of them are stupider than that - George Carlin
I always kinda hate this quote because that’s not really how averages work.
Think of how stupid the median person is, then realise half of them are stupider than that - Not George Carlin
Average can be Median, Mean, Mode or even other measures.
Half the population: Who’s Median?
The joke works because intelligence tests follow a normal bell curve. Therefore, approximately half of the population would actually fall below average.
I mean, it is intended to be how averages work for sufficiently large sample sizes. That’s the intent of a bell curve. For 800 people, maybe not, but for 8 billion? Probably extremely close.
I guess my point is really just that it’s a curve and not a triangle.
Averages don’t always* work like that. In a lot of real world cases, that statement is accurate enough. When we are doing average wealth then yea, the numbers will be skewed a lot, but something like height would likely have similar mean and median.
Average ≠ mean necessarily
But it does in this context no? We are talking arithmetic here
No. There are various ways to calculate the average: mean, median, mode etc
Interesting, but the way the average function works in something like excel is mean?
Yes. They didn’t use the word mean because it confuses non technical users.
yeah i dont like it either. i always thought that most people were supposed to be of average intelligence. so half of people are average, with the remaining half being split between the dumb dumbs and the geniuses
It is if the distribution is symmetric and there are enough samples.
Image description: A screenshot of the main character from the film “Idiocracy” looking very uncomfortable with his circumstances.
I am stupid :3 I will always find a way to outstupid the stupid :3
“There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.” - Park Rangers talking about me
Related: “I would never want to be part of a club that would have me as a member.”
I know someone that saying Steam Deck sucks because its running linux, that a Lenovo Legion is superior, because its running Windows, but also complain about Windows updates and disabled all updates. Like dude gets a new device and the first thing he does is turn off updates, and then stays on the stock rom. Well good luck running the 5 year old OS while you do online banking, dumbass, surely the cybercriminals would be nice to you.
A lot of “stupidity” you see in the world is a result of anxiety and exhaustion proximately caused by individual poverty and bad infrastructure* imo
*Infrastructure includes hard systems like transit and housing and soft systems like community organizations and government agencies imo
When I had intense legal problems I found myself being stupid and then regretted decades ago judging all the kids at school who may have had horrific home lives.
Probably true, but I don’t think that warrants the stupidity being put in scare quotes like that. Regardless of whether it is intrinsic or extrinsic stupidity, stupidity by nature or by nurture, the result is genuine stupidity all the same
I feel like it’s pretty common for kids to see the actions of adults and think they’re all stupid until they themselves become adults and finally see what motivated those actions in the first place.
The few adults I’ve run into who maintained the whole “everyone else is such a moron” both overestimated their own intelligence by an order of magnitude and were cripplingly narcissistic.
A problem is that people are both very stupid and very smart, just not about the same things.
“Think of how stupid the average person is. Now understand that HALF us are even stupider than that!”
So has average intelligence fallen that much or has the distribution changed so much that the median and the average are quite different? Maybe our graph is now u shaped with a huge number at very low intelligence and equal a very high and not much middle ground? What is it about the internet and 24hour news that has collectively dumbed down the population?
Carlin really had some amazing quotes
The difference is not huge, but that is the definition of the median.
Example: There are five kids in the class: Alicia (4’), Beth (4’), Charles (5’), Dan (7’) and Emma (3 miles). The average height of the class is 1060 feet. Are half of the kids taller/shorter than that? Nah. However, the median is Charles’ height, 5 feet. ~Half of the students are above that, and ~half of them are below. If it’s an even number of students, the median is between the two middle ones.
Also, I’m slightly worried about Emma.
Emma is just a young ancient norse wyrm. Honestly she’s kinda small for her age. You should see her dad he’s huge and has a really important job I hear. Something to do with a protected woodland or some such.
God damn this is too real
Yes because almost everyone in the planet agrees with the sentiment, even the people we consider stupid (who use a different metric).
Not true, because a fuckton of those stupid people erroneously believe they’re smarter than everyone else in the world. The number of times I have heard “if I were in charge, everything would be straightened out” from these troglodytes is too damn high. I’m actually smart enough to know how insanely demanding “being in charge” and “doing things right” actually fucking is so I god damned know I am not up for the challenge so, yeah, actually they’re still actually fucking stupid. Sorry, not sorry.
Yeah I know: Dunning-Kruger effect.
You only need to be of average intelligence to have 4 billion people dumber than you
The problem presents when the average goes down.
I’m not appreciably smarter than I was a decade ago, but the average person appears to have been collecting head injuries in that time it would seem.
I get the idea and have said similar things in the past, but defining intelligence is where I get hung up. Socially speaking it makes a lot of sense though.
My very rough very compressed minimal definition is something like:
“Ability to distinguish truths from falsehoods within the confines of available information”
I totally get that. I routinely remind the dumbest people online that I am orders of magnitude intellectually superior to them, and they immediately assume I’m calling myself smart. Nope. I’m not that smart.
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