this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
-20 points (26.2% liked)

Canada

9950 readers
1338 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It seems really clear it was an argument against using an absurd example.

According to upvotes - many people only read the headline.

Never forget: 50% of the population have below average intelligence, by definition.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Nitpick, but that'd be the ~~mean~~ median, not average. Say intelligence is a scale out of 10, and we have a population of 4, that have intelligences of 2, 4, 5 and 10. The average would be (2+4+5+10)/4=5.25. 75% is actually worse than average. Extreme values mess with averages a lot - that 10 pulled up the average much higher than . The ~~mean~~ median would be (4+5)/2=4.5, which lines up with that statement, as it's by definition the dead center of all the values in a statistical population.

Edit: median, not mean

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I see your nitpick and raise you a nitpick - what you're thinking of is median.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

True. Legitimate ESL mistake haha

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is the problem with small sample sizes, which is why we have standard deviation. Given that IQ is on a normal curve (it is) and we have a large sample size (we do), the deviation is going to be very small.

So, very very close to 50% of the population is below average intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Let's keep in mind modern IQ tests scores are normalized to a normal distribution with a mean of 100 and some fixed standard deviation on purpose (15? can't remember), so of course they'll fit a normal curve, they are literally made that way.

I'm also admittedly extremely skeptical of IQ as a measure of general intelligence. It's not like we have a shortage of high IQ morons out there. It's a decent estimate of relative intelligence in certain areas, most notably of logical thinking, at best.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

I'm in no danger here: I'm safely in the dumb 50%.