this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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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.