r/talesfromtechsupport • u/[deleted] • Dec 18 '19

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u/nosoupforyou Dec 18 '19

George Carlin did a study and found that half of all people are dumber than average.

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u/Glaselar Dec 19 '19 edited Dec 19 '19

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.

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u/[deleted] Dec 19 '19

And when you have a bit more than a bit more education, you know that Intelligence is mostly a bell curve so there's no practical difference.

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u/JasperJ Dec 19 '19

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.