this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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What's worse is that half of the students are performing worse than the median.
Reminds me of an old Carlin joke:
"Think about how stupid the average person you meet in a day is. Think about it, think about it.
HALF OF THEM ARE EVEN STUPIDER THAN THAT!"
Now if only we could judge people on actual intelligence instead of just how much we disagree with them...
I mean, wouldnt that be a worse basis for judgement though? Like, a significant amount a person's intelligence is based on non-voluntary factors, so judging someone for a lower than average intelligence seems unfair in the same way that judging them for being short or looking unattractive or such would be. Further, while a lower intelligence might make it harder for someone to understand more complicated ideas, it isnt a guarantee of them being wrong either, so one cant dismiss the contributions of a less intelligent person as always useless just because of their intelligence. Meanwhile, a person's views are comparatively more changeable, more influenced by that person's decisions, and an incorrect or morally repugnant idea is going to be wrong regardless of how intelligent the person holding it is.
People aren't judging others they meet on a day to day basis on "repugnant ideals" or moral absolutes. They're judging people based on those people doing something that they don't like. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred people are just going about their day, they're not trying to push their agenda or make you live the way they prefer.
Really, my criticism was of the basis of the quote, that someone is stupid because of how you met them during the day rather than their actual intelligence level. That someone is dumb because they don't agree with you, or do something in a way you don't like. Which, kind of, is what you're saying. The problem is they're quantifying it as stupidity instead of moral repugnance.
There are a ton of intelligent people who are absolutely abhorrent. Just because they disagree with you doesn't mean they're dumb... they just don't share your values.
But it's an average, there's chance of more than a half (although with normal distribution we should expect average and median to be the same)
Given that average can refer to median, and he's saying that half of people are stupider than the average, we can conclude he probably meant the median :)
I wonder what percentage of people who hear/read that will assume median or know what that is
Less than half.
A median is specifically a method of taking an average that always results in half above and half below. Take the total number of participants, divide it by two, then count that number from either end. The middle is the median. It's a more accurate form of averages for statistical analysis.
Mean is where you add all of the scores and divide by the total number of participants. It's more liable to be skewed by outliers, so not necessarily in the dead center of the list. It's often avoided in statistical analysis for that reason.
Edit: I just reread your comment and on second glance it seems we're saying the same thing. I should have replied to the commenter below you...
I actually went and investigated this at some point out of curiosity and came across a paper showing that intelligence is not a normal distribution but a sum of TWO normal distributions, the second one much smaller than the first and slightly offset (towards the lower values if I remember it correctly).
That being so, for the distribution of intelligence in humans the median is not the same as the mean (which is what's commonly meant by "average") so it's slightly incorrect to say that half of people are below average intelligence.
That's unfortunate if it really is not normal
If I remember it correctly, the second normal at lower IQs was due to environmental factors during growing up that caused some people to have a lower level of intelligence that they would otherwise have.
Did they stop teaching the difference between mean, median, and mode the year after I left elementary school? It seems like nobody knows that those are all three types of average anymore
They don't have that in New Math.
I don't really get your point as under the assumption of normal distribution all three are the same
Albeit there was another comment about intelligence not being normal distribution which is a bit unfortunate imo
And practically every time I see someone talk about average it is a mean, a lot rarer it's median, and I never heard anyone talk about mode in general public
I think median is a type of average like mean.
I have unironically seen rich people say that everyone can be above average as an excuse of why things are the way they are.
While the median is hard to believe, I think it's worse in some ways that half of the students are performing worse than the mean.
we need more students to fail harder to bring the mean down then?