Comment by bigmattystyles
4 years ago
This reveals itself with the Carlin joke about the average person being dumb and that by implication 1/2 of the population is even dumber. Carlin and people who eagerly repeat it don’t know about distributions and that intelligence is not a standard distribution. Mea culpa, I used to parrot and believe the joke…
I suspect Carlin understood averages and the diversity of intelligence better than your comment implies. He probably was just having fun with the idea. After all, it is a good joke.
Intelligence, as measured, shows a normal distribution. Just like height, grip strength, BMI, and many other human metrics.
Hence the name of a rather notorious book by Charles Murray.
The median is also an average.
Only in a standard distribution right?
No, the word average is a place holder for measures of central tendencies (like mean, median and mode).
Any symmetrical distribution will have the mean equal the median.
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