Astonishing

About 50% of people are below average
- Imagine communicating who ranked ~~first~~ last anually on a national level lmao.
  Edit: I meant "last" not "first". What a crucial mistake lol.
- This cracks me up because it is often said with such confidence, but it is just wrong.
  If you have 10 people, 8 have an intelligence score of 1, 1 has a score of 5 and 1 has a score of 10. The average is 2.3 which means that 80% of the people are below average.
  The median is the only thing that is going to guarantee 50%.
  
  On a bell curve the average and mean are the same. Your example isn't a bell curve. Many things will be a bell curve.
  
  People who don't know that average can be mean, median or mode depending on the context crack me up.
  
  Yes, that statement is made under the assumption of large sample sizes (where the central limit theorem applies)
- "think of the average person. Now remember that half of everyone is dumber than them"
  
  The median person*

Think about how dumb the average person is. And then remember that half of them are dumber than that!
- Carlin was a prophet
  
  But he was shit at statistics. He mixes up median and mean.
- Yes but I don't know who the average person is, maybe I know a lot of dumber than average people!

I guess the education system is really struggling ...
(Also his account is satire, right?)
- Yes, he is the Congressman for California's 54th district (it only has 52, but was probably still 53 when he started the satire account).
  
  Wow, at least 13 years. I remember coming across him when reddit was young: https://www.prwatch.org/spin/2010/09/9423/washington-post-duped-fake-congressman
- oh thank christ

Err... im not sure everyone in this thread is getting the joke?
- That the bottom 25% of scorers in standardized tests are in the bottom quartile of the distribution, which is literally defined as the bottom 25%, but the Twitter user seems to be using that fact to justify something yet he's literally just stating a fact?
  The bottom 25% will always exist and there will always be 25% of the results contained within it.
  Not sure how anyone doesn't get it, but this Twitter screenshot exists, so there's that.
  Oh, sorry, this "x" exists. Dumb fucking name.
  
  Am I misreading this or are you doubling down on not getting it’s satire?
  
  The twitter account is a satire account. They're trying to stir the pot.
  
  Don't forget that about half the population have an IQ below average
  
  You sound like you're at the top of the bell curve
- Poe's law is a removed.

Small head: He’s proving his point really well.
Big head: He’s proving his point really well.

100% of people who have committed a murder have drunk DiHydrogen Monoxide within the last two weeks, do you feel safe giving this to your children?
- It’s toxic and can lead to DEATH if inhaled! Big if true!
  
  So can dioxide, in fact oxide is responsible for so many processes which lead to "break down" of many molecules that it's got a specific term oxidation, methinks dihydrogen monooxide is also bad because of that oxide thing.

But 25% of all American students also scored in the top quartile on standardized tests, so it cancels out!
- Plus, it's amazing that every student at least got placed on the graph. Missing that would be shameful.
  
  Just another example of those damn participation trophies.
- I can't tell if you are joking. You must be, but it reads too sincerely.
  
  You could even call it a New Sincerity.
  
  I've been told I have deadpan delivery sometimes. I guess it translates to my comments too.
  I'm not sure if this is a good thing. But yes, I'm keeping with the tone set by the comment above me.

But at least the healthcare system is quite good: most people have more legs than average
- More eyes too
  
  Source?
  
  I’m pretty proud to report that I have an above-average number of penises (nearly double, in fact).
  However, my wife has grown more balls than I’ve ever had.

Normal if true
- Dang there's layers to this one
- What a gauss!

How astute. You're really top of the bell curve.
- Hey that's a sly insult :D
  I'm definitely gonna use that one later.

Are memes just straight screenshots of Twitter now?
- I mean I'll be the first to admit agenda posting, but at least I be posting memes...
  
  Agenda posting? What is this, PCM?

This is satire.
- I'm shocked

This is officially the second dumbest take on the value of a quarter.
I knew a person who thought quarter to six meant 5:35 because "how many cents in a quarter dumbass."
- Wait.....what? I'm struggling to comprehend this level of nonsense.
  
  Quarter=25 cents. 25 minutes before six=5:35. And also OP is making it up, because no one that stupid is also doing extra math.

Technically, if everyone gets the full mark, no one will be in the bottom quartile.
- Also, everyone would be in the bottom quartile. The definitions fall apart when you collapse the probability function.
- I’m overthinking this.
  If everyone gets the full mark, it’s not a random variable anymore, you would have a collapse of the probability distribution, that would tend to a Dirac delta function. In this case, the very definition of “quartiles” would fail. So, yeah, there would be no one there because it wouldn’t exist.

If ever a reliable method for measuring actual intelligence rather than IQ is invented I imagine we'll be seeing a somewhat lumpier graph than that smooth mean distribution curve.
- No, this is how a graph showing quartiles will always look because quartiles, by definition, always include a fixed percentage of the studied population under them.
  In this case the lower quartile will always have 25% of the population under it, 50% under the second quartile, and 75% under the third quartile.
  Quartiles break a population into 4 equal portions.
  
  While that's true, the actual empirical curve does not have to be smooth. Or gaussian.
  
  Spendrill is not misunderstanding the OP. He's just saying that if intelligence could be measured by a better metric, then distribution of that metric among the population would not look as smooth as the one in the OP.
  
  I know what this graph is, I was talking about a graph that actually showed something useful. If you've got a couple of hours to learn something useful then you could do worse than to look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
- At the end of the day, reducing intelligence down to one single number is already kind of questionable. What does it mean for someone to be 1 point more intelligent than another person?
  
  It's also, there are several different axes that you could measure intelligence along, spatial intelligence and awareness, emotional intelligence and so on. Also intelligence is a sliding scale, there are definitely times of the day, week month and year when I am less able to solve problems and more likely to cause them and then you're into the social aspects, it's been demonstrated that people's ability to think straight is affected by how precarious their existence is and so on.
  
  If you took a test as a child, it was probably WISC-V.
  This assessment provides the following scores:
  A Composite Score that represents a child's overall intellectual ability (FSIQ)
  Primary Index Scores that measure the following areas of cognitive functioning: Verbal Comprehension Index (VCI), Visual Spatial Index (VSI), Fluid Reasoning Index (FRI), Working Memory Index (WMI), and the Processing Speed Index (PSI).
  Ancillary Index Scores are also provided: The Quantitative Reasoning Index (QRI) ; Auditory Working Memory Index (AWMI); Nonverbal Index (NVI); General Ability Index (GAI); and the Cognitive Proficiency Index (CPI).
  Which seems very reasonable to me. This was originally intended to be an aptitude test, not strictly to measure your intelligence.
- Is there a c/woosh?
  
  Is there a c/IGotTheJokeJustWantedToMakeAGeneralPointAboutTheArtificialityOfIntelligenceQuotients
  I swear if all the snide little pricks come over from reddit too I am going to have to abandon Lemmy also.
- It would almost certainly follow an approximate normal distribution just like the above graph. Why would it look different?

Big if true, bruh.

He couldn't be more right. Absolutely appalling.

Refusing to invest in education makes it worse!? shocked Pikachu
- Read it again.
  
  Hey, don’t be too hard on them, they proved their own point with that take

It's amazing you used standardized test stats, while I believe the test are part of the problem. When I was in school, you learned the subject, and the standardized test was a decent level. Now, all the subjects are should be called reading comprehension, because that's how they teach. Teachers are held to teach their students how to pass the test. Extra school funds are tied to percentages based on test scores. So they pass out, and teach off of, worksheets that are mirrored off of these test. So they don't teach science, hey teach you to answer the multiple choice questions after reading about science. Everytime my kids bring homework home i ask them if all of their work is like this, this being reading comprehension worksheets, and they say "pretty much".
- My favorite example of how broken it is is from my Senior year in high school.
  The test used for funding at time was the TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills). It was insultingly easy. I aced the High School Exit Exam version of it it in 4th grade. But EVERYTHING in school was about that test.
  We actually took the real test in 10th grade, so everyone had extra chances if they failed it. If you didn't pass, you were placed in special classes that focused even MORE heavily on it so you could try again the next semester. In order to take any AP courses after 10th, you had to have already passed the test. In my English IV AP courses, every student in the class had gotten a perfect score on the exam 2 years earlier.
  They still made us practice it weekly. We had block scheduling, so "weekly" was 40% of all class meetings. Why did we have to keep practicing for a test we'd already aced? Because they wanted to the teacher to practice having the students practice.
  We never practiced for the SAT.

My brother on christ, that is at best a third, not a quarter
- Woosh He just said the top 25% is as smart as the top 25% and the bottom 25% is as smart as the bottom 25%...