To even graduate medical school as the bottom half is impressive though. I know people in medical school, and know how much they have to study to keep up, simply graduating is still intelligent as hell over here.
The funniest thing about this joke is that with just a bit more education, the audience would be able to recognise it isn't true.
Half of all people are dumber than median.
If you've got 7 billion people with equal intelligence and then 1 genius comes along, you've suddenly got 7 billion people who are below average and 1 who's above.
This is why national salaries are listed by the median value and not the average; the 1% drag the average up so it's not useful for comparing anything.
Given that intelligence is typically measured by IQ, it’s literally defined to a normal distribution. Which, yes, means that 50% of the people have an IQ of less than 100 and 100 is the average. If a mega super genius came along (geniuses aren’t that far above the norm, for the record), he’d have an IQ of around 250 or so, even if he had a brain the size of a planet, and 100 would still be the same as before. Because that’s how IQ works.
Colloquia. Also, everyone. "Average" just means "whatever measure of central tendency is most appropriate for this particular situation." You only think it means arithmetic mean because that is the type of average that you are most familiar with seeing.
It has exactly one meaning. "Whichever measure of central tendency is most appropriate in this situation." The "three meanings" you are talking about are median, mode, and mean, the last of which can mean four of more different things.
The median is a type of average. An average is simply a measure of a datset's center. Mean, median, and mode are all valid types of averages. It just most often colloquially refers to the mean, but the other two are valid averages as well.
The funniest thing about this joke is that with just a bit more education, the audience would be able to recognise it isn't true.
No, with more education, it would still be true.
In most population statistics a mean and an average are going to be roughly the same, as most distributions are roughly normal in large enough populations.
This is true for things like intelligence and height.
Your example of why mean and average aren't the same is a fringe case that is used to highlight the difference between the two. In practice though, they'll be functionally the same in a lot of cases.
Sure, but it's a joke about a study. You wouldn't get a study that plays fast and loose with that kind of language.
It's just an opportunity here to go from a lol on Reddit to tacking on a bit of statical literacy that could be helpful for average people tackling popular media headlines.
Not necessarily true, actually. If you have one extremely smart person and 9 normally and equally intelligent people in a room, 9 out of 10 people will have below average intelligence in that room.
Right, "1 in 10 people who apply to the army" is not a representative sample. But the 1 in 10 people measurement isn't just people who apply to the army. It's everyone. About 1 in 7 people have an IQ below 85, which is close to the US Army's requirement for enlistment (they use a different test). So the actual number is a bit higher.
Uh, IIRC, similar figures were obtained from draft intakes...
Although such did exclude avoiders / evaders / deferrers...
I'm reminded of the 'Beverly Hillbillies' sight-gag where 'Jethro' briskly whittles Army test's wooden pegs to make them fit shaped holes in board. Completed within allotted time, that counted as a 'Pass'...
I heard a piece on NPR that covered this. The full transcript is here; the relevant quotation that stuck in my mind was:
An interesting example of that is the U.S. military uses a test called the ASVAB to screen young recruits when they're just coming out of high school and they don't know much about them. And historically, at times when the Army has let people in who've scored the equivalent of below an 80 on an IQ test, the Army has been rendered less efficient, so the troops don't follow orders as well, they can't figure out complex machinery like tanks or read maps.
I'm actually pretty sure theres a form of mental block against reading maps or recognizing how the map relates to real world geography. Not sure if its named or an actual 'condition' per se, but I both vaguely remember reading something to the effect, and have known several otherwise very intelligent people who simply could not find their way across an open gymnasium with one.
Similar to simply having bad spatial/directional awareness, id think, and ive known MANY with that trait who couldnt tell you which way is north if they were standing at the intersection of two interstates in a place theyd lived all their lives.
Edit: its much worse than I thought. Theres even a condition thats recognized that, while having no brain damage, one simply CANNOT create a 'mental map' of familiar places.
Map-block ? It's real. Scary real. And, I dare say, a familial trait. Across my extended family, I've several of the best map-readers you could hope to meet, also some of the very, very worst.
One such was a scout-master. His troop soon learned that if they didn't independently track navigation, they'd land hungry, tired, cold, wet and miles off 'planned' route up a dead-end lane in the dark, yet again, yet again...
My wife had similar issues among her kin, was as delighted as I was to discover we shared a love of maps, geology and 'Physical Geography'...
That's different though. I'm talking about literally being unable to tell left from right when reading a physical map, or not being able to spot grid coordinates accurately. Those kinds of skills can definitely be taught to varying degrees - which explains why the Army won't take anybody below a certain IQ, I guess. Quick recall is an absolute necessity on the battlefield.
Being directionally challenged or having an inability to create mental maps is a neurological condition, not a case where somebody is an absolute moron.
Depending on the map, its not exactly easy either. I have problems on topographical ones. If youre talking a basic 'heres a square, find yourself in the square, find two things around you also in the square, go this direction from those two things' map, then sure. Theres idiots out there, and its a dying skillset in these days of gps being freely available.
But I think a lot of thats a different discussion, since if a global emp went off we'd mostly be screwed anyway for lack of even more important skills to survival that have gone the way of the dodo.
Either way, the military actually having a 'you must be less stupid than this line to enter' policy isnt news.
There aren't any specific sources. Jordan Peterson refers to it in a few videos and if you google US military IQ research you'll find some stuff. I'm on my phone right now and serious digging and copy-pasting is headache-inducing without a proper keyboard and mouse. I will try to find something to post when I get home from work tonight if you haven't already looked into it by then. The gist is that they won't recruit anyone with an IQ under 83 or something because they're just too dumb to do any job and that's about 10% of people.
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u/Huecuva Dec 18 '19
The US military did a study and determined that 1 in every 10 people are too stupid to even be trained to do anything.