I believe in this. Smarts are more like a distribution curve, even in a single individual.
There are areas I am in the 1 percentile, I think I can say without exaggeration. Those areas I seem to have insights in without effort, coupled with thousands of hours of focus.
But I experience a high cost of many things I do very very badly compared to almost EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know.
I am not alone in this assessment of myself. Friends & family all agree.
My many areas of remarkable incompetence, besides occasionally causing me great shame, make it very clear to me that everyone I know or meet has something to offer, at least to me!
There's so many facets to intelligence. There's a lot of areas that I'm more competent than most in and I learn very quickly. Then there's things like math where I have plenty of education, but the simplest real-world applications throw me for a loop. Add in frequent blonde moments and I can go from looking like the smartest person in the room to the stupidest in no time.
Smarter at what? Smarter at the things you are good at of course and there are lots of people who are not good at the things you are good at, so you consider yourself smarter than average.
If you asked people if they were smarter at everything than average what would they answer?
You can sort the results by agreement percent to see which questions are most and least skewed. Interestingly one of the most precisely balanced is "50% of participants think they are better looking than average."
I know people learn this in middle school, but I've never seen an actual scholarly work call the median or mode "the average"--and I think I'd find it slightly misleading if they did.
"Typical", "likely", (etc) are all fine, but to me, "average" strongly implies "mean."
That precision of language is not the way most people would use that word, eg "a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values" - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/average
"be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" - Robustness principle
It's good to be precise when communicating, but in most contexts you shouldn't expect it from others.
I understand that some sources say that one can use "average" to mean something other than the mean.
My claim, as an actual working[0] scientist who encounters those words a lot, is that nobody really does, outside of "Well, actually the average can be the median or mode too...."-type statements.
I'd put describing the mode as "the average" on par with giving someone a tomato and zucchini salad while describing it as "mixed berries." Not technically wrong but....
[0] Well, slacking scientist at the moment, but...
Scholarly works will pretty much never call the mean "the average" without clarifying what they mean either.
As for the implication, a statement along the lines of "the average person" will almost always be interpreted as median, not mean. For example, Jeff Bezos lives in Medina, WA, a remarkably anagrammatic suburb for this demonstration. You can probably understand why saying "the average person in Medina has a net worth of $65,000,000" is both somewhat misleading and remarkably unhelpful for pretty much any purpose you'd want that information.
People use "mean" and "average" in way that suggest they're the same, but one certainly doesn't have to say "average (herein defined as the mean)" because that's the overwhelmingly dominant meaning anyway.
In fact, I'd say that "averagING" (as a verb) almost has to be the mean; I'd find it deceptive if it were mode-finding.
You're right that people often conflate the mean and median, but I think that's more to do with underestimating the very, very long tails of some distributions.
I certainly agree that people mix them up. If you ask someone to quickly estimate the average/mean of something, you are likely to get some other location measure, like the median or mode. Some of this might be a heuristic: it's easier to mentally estimate the middle/most common item than it is to keep a running sum, and for many distributions, you get a similar answer. Some of it might be due to fogginess over the definitions. And, of course, these other summary statistics are often closer to what people regard as a `typical' value, especially if there's a long tail, so it
On the other hand, suppose we had some data like this
X=[2, 2, 2, 4, 4, 8, 16]
If I asked you what the average of X was, the answer I'm expecting is "5.4", or perhaps "the median is 4", "the mode is 2", etc. I would be surprised if you just answered "2" or "4", and once I figured out what you did, I would find it annoyingly pedantic.
I've worked with a lot of different people from different backgrounds, and I don't think anyone has ever used (unadorned) average to mean something other than the mean. Perhaps your experience is different.
Alright, this is rooted in a confusion between the normal use in statistics and the normal use in human speech.
Absolutely, average-without-qualifications means the mean, if we're going to be handed a list of actual numbers and expected to produce another number from them.
But especially for highly right-tailed distributions, when people talk about the average, they mean something more like the median, if there's a significant difference.
I would find it annoyingly pedantic if someone said the average net worth in Jeff Bezos' municipality was 60mm, if the median was closer to 0.75mm. If I was handing someone an Excel spreadsheet of tax returns, I would of course tell them that we needed the median. Or the mean but in this circumstance I wouldn't use the word 'average' because of the wide skew. If I did anyway, yeah I would probably get the mean back.
That's how average works in statistics, but not in common speech.
Whatever 'scholarly work' does or doesn't do, journalists certainly interchange them; sometimes leaving a hint like the implied distinction between 'the average <trait>' (mean) and 'the average person's <trait>' (median; sometimes mode for physical discrete things). Also, though, that can just be sloppy and have no intentional implication, misleading depending on the reader.
Maybe. Body brokers are companies that own cadavers and sell them for medical research. The people who own these and similar companies have large numbers of legs and probably raise the average number of legs more than the few people who have one or fewer legs.
If we were betting on average leg ownership in the US I'd bet on slightly more than 2.
But those people are dead. So if you count up all the live legs, which will be slightly less than 2*live people, and then add in the dead legs, this may be somewhat more than 2*live people. And since the humor in GP comment is attributing the "having" of the legs to the owners of the cadavers, the denominator remains 'live people'. Thus the average number of legs to "have" is greater than 2.
And if some of this chopping happens. Is it more likely that the legs or body is destroyed? I would guess that more of the bodies are stored than the legs... But now if we extend to organs, heads and brains... How do we calculate those? Like do we need complete sets, or something less? Or is sufficient mass enough to count as one unit.
Yes, the legs come from people who had at most two but the people who own the body brokers now have those legs. For simplicity let's say person X is the sole owner of a body broker that sells cadavers to medical schools. If a school calls up X they may ask how many legs he has, and may give an answer like "I have 100 legs" (plus the approximately 2 legs X is likely not willing to sell).
On subjective qualitative questions, the average should probably be above 50% because everybody has different scales and are probably following their own scale better than average.
eg. If you believe good driving means following traffic laws, you probably follow traffic laws better than average. If you believe good driving means low lap time on a race track, you might have a better lap time than average.
on Firefox 88/Windows there seems to be a bug where the 'crowd' isn't re-flowed after window changes size, but the fonts/ui ARE being reflowed. This leads to a issue where the 'crowd' may sit over the buttons and make the UI unusable.
While I realize the purpose is to force a choice, I'd be interested to see the results if there was an "I don't know" option.
There were some questions where I'm very confident that I'm above/below average, and others where I basically have no idea, but I had to pick something.
Only 19% think they are more religious than average. I find that very interesting. Not sure if it's an artifact of the kind of people who have taken the survey so far, a statement about how people want to be perceived in our culture, or a bit of both.
It's been a while since this was updated (2014), but it indicates that over 50% of people consider religion "very important" in their life. Only 11% said religion was "not at all important."
So while you could imagine a society where 80% of people believe they aren't religious at all, the United States at least does not appear anywhere near that number.
> Not sure if it's an artifact of the kind of people who have taken the survey so far, a statement about how people want to be perceived in our culture, or a bit of both.
It could also be that the (loose, intuitively approximated) mode on some level of granularity (the individual category perceived as most commonly seen) rather than the median is going to frequently be the intuitive yardstick for “average”, rather than median (mean of a ordinal categorical trait with no unique obvious reduction to an interval-level measure has no coherent definition, so its not really a candidate average.)
Yeah, this one is pretty easily explained as a statistical artifact in this way. The more religious someone is, the more time they are likely to spend around other religious people (at church, with friends met via church, various knock on effects of these things). As you become more religious, this effect will tend to increase your estimate of the population's average religiosity.
This also explains a number of political effects, especially once you start looking for it in other high time commitment social activities.
It would be helpful if the site could define what they mean by the average. The average visitor to the website thanaverage.xyz? The average American? the average person around the world? It seems like it would be more interesting to make a guess about the average visitor to the website, but it's not clear if that's the case or not. Compared to the average American or the world, the numbers for this small segment of people who would visit this website would not reflect the average.
But then aggregating the results together doesn't really mean anything. 100% of responses could be "I am more XYZ than average" and they could all be correct.
Still not clear IMHO. What is "peers and neighbours"? Same country as me? Same age as me? Same gender as me? Same socio-economic group as me? If I take all that to one extreme, then I have zero peers and neighbours, because nobody is in all the exact same categories as me. If I take it to the other extreme, then all other living (or dead?!) humans (or lifeforms?!) on Earth (or elsewhere?!) are my peers and neighbours.
I wonder how much of the results reflects the biased group that is answering the questions.
For example, 75% said they were more privileged when I looked, but if they are all coming from sites like this and have good jobs, that might be quite reasonable.
Important to realize that the average taker of this survey is likely nowhere close to the average person on quite a few of these qualities, or even the average internet user. It's going to skew more tech savvy / progressive / intelligent / etc -- the Hacker News bump alone renders the "insights" you might glean from the results almost meaningless.
For example, that 76% of takers think they are more privileged than average is probably an underestimate, not an overestimate as you would first believe...
It asks you to compare yourself to your peers, not to the global population, so the results should still be close to 50%, even if it does say "average" and not "median".
> For a multivariate normal distribution in high dimensions, nearly all the probability mass is concentrated in a thin shell some distance away from the origin.
When designing cockpits using the average dimensions of pilots the US Air Force found exactly 0 pilots who were average in all 10 dimensions. Even just using 3 dimensions only 3.5% were considered “average”. Take the average dimensions of a human hand and draw that hand. Almost nobody has the dimensions of that hand.
That’s so cool: just occurred to me it’s like the inverse of crowdsourcing. No one guesses the right weight of the cow, but the average of all guesses is almost exactly the right weight.
Well, here you never know the weight of the cow, per se. If the weight-of-cow question were asked, it would "If you were asked to guess the weight of some cow, do you believe you would overestimate it?" And then you find out, that, 63% other people share your self-evaluation, or else do not. There is no info about any actual cow.
Fewer friends than average actually kind of makes sense:
> The friendship paradox is the phenomenon first observed by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991 that most people have fewer friends than their friends have, on average. It can be explained as a form of sampling bias in which people with more friends are more likely to be in one's own friend group. Or, said another way, one is less likely to be friends with someone who has very few friends.
> [...]
> In spite of its apparently paradoxical nature, the phenomenon is real, and can be explained as a consequence of the general mathematical properties of social networks. The mathematics behind this are directly related to the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality and the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality.
Strangely, however:
> In contradiction to this, most people believe that they have more friends than their friends have.
That's certainly an interesting point. The questions have ~9K responses at this time; I wonder how many of those can be attributed to an hour of being posted on HN.
I wouldn't say "progressive" is a word I'd associate with the HN demographic, based on some of what I've seen here. There's a definite libertarian skew, but that seems to fall along both sides of the left/right political spectrum.
As to whether the typical HN user would answer "yes" if asked if they are more progressive than average, however, I do also suspect they would answer "yes."
Yup. And given that an almost exactly inverse group said they're more conservative than average, that's a hot take on how tech libertarians view themselves if given a binary choice.
Forgive my ignorance - why wouldn't, "I'm average," not be an option? For multiple questions, I found myself feeling neither more nor less than average.
Also things like “better partner” are so conditional on who you partner with that a simple general better vs. worse decision seems impossible to answer in a meaningful way.
The problem with having such options in surveys is that everyone then picks it, even though it is statistically unlikely. So better to force them to make a decision instead.
I think four bins of below average, slightly below average, slightly above average, and above average would be reasonable. It would show how many people think they fit into the interquartile range versus the extremities.
But then it will just take longer. You'll still have to pick which side of the average you're on, plus how extreme (or maybe you'll just never pick the extreme).
This. I closed out of the quiz when I saw that I couldn't answer "close to average, and without enough certainty or precision to guess above or below".
I have the same issue with most of the popular personality tests. Many of my responses are either extremely neutral or could wildly swing depending on the week, month, year, etc.
For a continuously measured variable like height or attractiveness or curiosity measured at arbitrary precision, your probability of being average is 0.
> measured at arbitrary precision, your probability of being average is 0
You're talking about a site that currently measures with precision of 1 bit, in which case your probability of being average is basically 100% comparing to either extreme.
Think of it as a bet. There's no harm in picking either above or below average when you're uncertain into which bin you'll fall, because those cases will even out in the end anyway. Sometimes you'll chose "below average" and actually be 0.1 standard deviations above average. Others will be the other way around, but for your return on investment those cases are not the ones that matter.
In fact, if there was a third "within +-0.3 standard deviations of average" you would probably be unwise to pick it, simply because "below average" has a greater expected value due to covering more of the range of possibilities, even when it's only true 50 % of the time.
Besides, being forced to really try to sense which way one leans is informative!
Right, but comparing opinions in the first place is odd. Is this concept more common than I'm giving credit for? I would assume that everyone thinks they have the best taste in music - if they like something better that would be their taste in music.
Yeah i think you're just missing something here. Its pretty common for people to compare themselves to others like this.
Not all of the questions are equally qualitative. Some are "i give more money to the homeless than average". You could theoretically measure this.
The purpose is probably just to understand peoples perceptions of themselves. (For example), i think i have better than average taste in music... after all, i meet artists and spend my free time going though new albums to find the next needle in a haystack.
You don't need to average opinions. Just imagine you pick a person at random from your peer group and ask yourself how likely it is that you have better taste in music than that person.
Right, but what does that even mean? My taste in music is the best, if there were music that I liked better, that music would be my taste in music. It's just an odd concept, comparing a taste like that.
Ok, I understand what they mean but I have no opinion on that, just generally not finding feet attractive and I can honestly say I have never considered the question before. I consider it for a few moments and realize I have no values that would allow me to formulate an opinion on it. So then I fall back to, would an average foot lover find my feet more or less attractive than average? I still have no idea. So then I fall back to a meta strategy, ok if I am going to answer questions stating my opinion when I have no opinion, what should I do? Alternate answers? Always answer that I am better? Always answer that I am worse? I understand that they are interested in what the distribution is going to be after people answer the questions so someone hedging is not giving helpful information.
I decided that my strategy was to leave the website. I was curious if anyone else found being presented with a binary choice for an estimate at a continuous random variable off putting. I would have been much more willing to give a confidence interval around some abstract mean.
> 23% of people say they're less smart than average [Paraphrasing].
That's interesting. Most of the other ones sit somewhere in the 40%-60%, but this is the only one I've seen where most people pick the "good" trait over the bad to such a high degree. I guess this says something about Hacker News.
The one question I saw 50% on was asking people if they were better or worse looking than average. The most skewed questions/answers were people saying they were more perceptive, lie less, are more liberal, and give less to the homeless than the averages.
EDIT: you can see the full list of questions and answers as well, and it’s more interesting than just what I wrote above.
So people are insecure about dancing and sex. This all tracks.
I wonder if and how things cluster around age, income, country of residence, etc.
What I'd really be interested in is a set of tags people can click as far as "which of these do you strongly identify with?" And then just have some broad categories that are ostensibly independent such as "investing", "politics", "exercise & fitness", "video or board games", "charity/volunteering", "night clubs/partying", "theater & the arts", "sci-fi or fantasy", "religion", "travelling/siteseeing", "meditation" ...
I'd assume most to be total noise but there may be a few interesting strong correlations that could inspire further study.
Moreover, if you ask your sex partners on the number of partners they have had, on the average their number is higher than yours. Again, it is not that you are a loser - it's the friendship paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox.
Ah, this feels interesting. I would have said I’m a below average dancer, but above average person at dancing. The difference being whether I compare to people who I observe dancing, or consider everyone. Differently for sex, I assume that this is possibly bimodal (none versus some), so this could provide a measure of the actual skew in the underlying distribution (difference between mean and median) and not only the perception of bias.
Not necessarily. It's the average of people playing the game, not reporting on some survey.
I saw better than average at maths around 68%... and that might be true for the kind of people who play this game. Dancing and sex might be the same story (didn't see those questions).
> So people are insecure about dancing and sex. This all tracks.
I reckon this is due to only watching apex males perform those acts. As opposed to maths where you probably remember your classmates struggling and were actually tested for your ability.
I think there's also mixing up "less/worse than average" with "less/worse than my share", and an uneven distribution makes those pretty different. There are some very good dancers doing a ton of dancing. So if you dance, it's probably a below average dance even if you're a slightly above average dancer. It might also be why so many people think they lie less than average. There's a minority that just lies their pants off, so most of us are telling less than our "share" of lies.
Lots of bias in the sample set. I'm pretty sure I'm less religious, more privileged, better with technology, more liberal etc. than the average American (or even my friends, family, neighbors), but probably not so compared to the average HN reader who took the survey.
It's missing the "about average" option. Many of the questions I'd like to say that I'm about average, I think. Like, for instance, I think I'm an about average driver and I think I'm about average when it comes to optimism.
The 'confidence' question was hard to answer. In some areas I am confident, in others not so much. I think most people are like that. There were a few other questions that I found hard to answer as yes or no. Or maybe I am misunderstanding confidence or don't want to see myself as lacking confidence.
That guideline is not there because we don't know how annoying HN comments can be, but because we do know. Reacting by adding snark or denunciation to the threads just makes things even worse.
The only response that really helps, in reaction to bad or unsubstantive or obvious comments, is to post good, substantive, non-obvious ones.
I wish I had seen the deleted comment. My take was obvious, but it was intended as a compliment to the creator of the piece, not to incite argument. Still, I'm curious to know why I got trolled for it.
The Friendship paradox has nothing to do with what people think: it's an observed fact and related to the way that node degree in social graphs work (or random graphs in general).
For example, if you go to a gym, you are probably among the weakest in the room. Simply because the strongest are more likely to be those who go to the gym the most and therefore, the ones you are most likely to encounter.
If you hit the dance floor, the same happens, and as expected, most people think they are below average dancers. In fact, the worst dancers may not dance at all, so you can't compare yourself to them.
This would be more fun if this could be done with the median. Then the "true" answer to any question would be 50% on both sides. (For example, more than 50% of people have a lower income than the mean income, due to extreme outliers.) I suppose in lay language the distinction gets muddled.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 352 ms ] threadTwo big outliers I saw was that apparently everyone thinks they have more common sense than average, and also more polite than average.
For me it's different, I think I'm smarter than average 77% of the time.
There are areas I am in the 1 percentile, I think I can say without exaggeration. Those areas I seem to have insights in without effort, coupled with thousands of hours of focus.
But I experience a high cost of many things I do very very badly compared to almost EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know.
I am not alone in this assessment of myself. Friends & family all agree.
My many areas of remarkable incompetence, besides occasionally causing me great shame, make it very clear to me that everyone I know or meet has something to offer, at least to me!
If you asked people if they were smarter at everything than average what would they answer?
Not necessarily. For instance there's:
> 77% of participants think they give less to homeless people than average.
Say most people give $0 to homeless people, but 30% of people give some. In that case 77% giving less than average may be correct.
"Typical", "likely", (etc) are all fine, but to me, "average" strongly implies "mean."
"be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others" - Robustness principle
It's good to be precise when communicating, but in most contexts you shouldn't expect it from others.
My claim, as an actual working[0] scientist who encounters those words a lot, is that nobody really does, outside of "Well, actually the average can be the median or mode too...."-type statements.
I'd put describing the mode as "the average" on par with giving someone a tomato and zucchini salad while describing it as "mixed berries." Not technically wrong but....
[0] Well, slacking scientist at the moment, but...
As for the implication, a statement along the lines of "the average person" will almost always be interpreted as median, not mean. For example, Jeff Bezos lives in Medina, WA, a remarkably anagrammatic suburb for this demonstration. You can probably understand why saying "the average person in Medina has a net worth of $65,000,000" is both somewhat misleading and remarkably unhelpful for pretty much any purpose you'd want that information.
Two random examples from other tabs I had open: https://direct.mit.edu/neco/article/16/3/477/6879/Mean-Insta... or https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(13)00798-8 Mean and average are clearly the same thing, but only via context.
In fact, I'd say that "averagING" (as a verb) almost has to be the mean; I'd find it deceptive if it were mode-finding.
You're right that people often conflate the mean and median, but I think that's more to do with underestimating the very, very long tails of some distributions.
What was the point of that?
I certainly agree that people mix them up. If you ask someone to quickly estimate the average/mean of something, you are likely to get some other location measure, like the median or mode. Some of this might be a heuristic: it's easier to mentally estimate the middle/most common item than it is to keep a running sum, and for many distributions, you get a similar answer. Some of it might be due to fogginess over the definitions. And, of course, these other summary statistics are often closer to what people regard as a `typical' value, especially if there's a long tail, so it
On the other hand, suppose we had some data like this
If I asked you what the average of X was, the answer I'm expecting is "5.4", or perhaps "the median is 4", "the mode is 2", etc. I would be surprised if you just answered "2" or "4", and once I figured out what you did, I would find it annoyingly pedantic.I've worked with a lot of different people from different backgrounds, and I don't think anyone has ever used (unadorned) average to mean something other than the mean. Perhaps your experience is different.
Alright, this is rooted in a confusion between the normal use in statistics and the normal use in human speech.
Absolutely, average-without-qualifications means the mean, if we're going to be handed a list of actual numbers and expected to produce another number from them.
But especially for highly right-tailed distributions, when people talk about the average, they mean something more like the median, if there's a significant difference.
I would find it annoyingly pedantic if someone said the average net worth in Jeff Bezos' municipality was 60mm, if the median was closer to 0.75mm. If I was handing someone an Excel spreadsheet of tax returns, I would of course tell them that we needed the median. Or the mean but in this circumstance I wouldn't use the word 'average' because of the wide skew. If I did anyway, yeah I would probably get the mean back.
That's how average works in statistics, but not in common speech.
If we were betting on average leg ownership in the US I'd bet on slightly more than 2.
Those legs came from people which had at most two of them. They don't manufacture legs or whatever.
Or if you chop them ... does the rest of the body cease to exist?
But I suppose a live person can also own a bunch of torsos. The statement however only pertained to legs.
There were some questions where I'm very confident that I'm above/below average, and others where I basically have no idea, but I had to pick something.
So while you could imagine a society where 80% of people believe they aren't religious at all, the United States at least does not appear anywhere near that number.
https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/importanc...
(You’re probably right anyways - there’s a reason I put ‘theoretically’ at the beginning of my first post)
It could also be that the (loose, intuitively approximated) mode on some level of granularity (the individual category perceived as most commonly seen) rather than the median is going to frequently be the intuitive yardstick for “average”, rather than median (mean of a ordinal categorical trait with no unique obvious reduction to an interval-level measure has no coherent definition, so its not really a candidate average.)
This also explains a number of political effects, especially once you start looking for it in other high time commitment social activities.
"Imagine you are in a room with 100 strangers, Imagine they're similar to your peers and neighbours."
It's just a fun website... don't think too much about it.
For example, 75% said they were more privileged when I looked, but if they are all coming from sites like this and have good jobs, that might be quite reasonable.
For example, that 76% of takers think they are more privileged than average is probably an underestimate, not an overestimate as you would first believe...
https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-norma...
> For a multivariate normal distribution in high dimensions, nearly all the probability mass is concentrated in a thin shell some distance away from the origin.
When designing cockpits using the average dimensions of pilots the US Air Force found exactly 0 pilots who were average in all 10 dimensions. Even just using 3 dimensions only 3.5% were considered “average”. Take the average dimensions of a human hand and draw that hand. Almost nobody has the dimensions of that hand.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956832
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287
> The friendship paradox is the phenomenon first observed by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991 that most people have fewer friends than their friends have, on average. It can be explained as a form of sampling bias in which people with more friends are more likely to be in one's own friend group. Or, said another way, one is less likely to be friends with someone who has very few friends.
> [...]
> In spite of its apparently paradoxical nature, the phenomenon is real, and can be explained as a consequence of the general mathematical properties of social networks. The mathematics behind this are directly related to the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality and the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality.
Strangely, however:
> In contradiction to this, most people believe that they have more friends than their friends have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox
Yeah, given my discussions about math with people in non-technical fields, I think this answer is very skewed.
As to whether the typical HN user would answer "yes" if asked if they are more progressive than average, however, I do also suspect they would answer "yes."
You're talking about a site that currently measures with precision of 1 bit, in which case your probability of being average is basically 100% comparing to either extreme.
In fact, if there was a third "within +-0.3 standard deviations of average" you would probably be unwise to pick it, simply because "below average" has a greater expected value due to covering more of the range of possibilities, even when it's only true 50 % of the time.
Besides, being forced to really try to sense which way one leans is informative!
> Do you have a better music taste than average?
What does this even mean? How can an opinion be averaged?
Not all of the questions are equally qualitative. Some are "i give more money to the homeless than average". You could theoretically measure this.
The purpose is probably just to understand peoples perceptions of themselves. (For example), i think i have better than average taste in music... after all, i meet artists and spend my free time going though new albums to find the next needle in a haystack.
> Are your feet better looking than average?
Ok, I understand what they mean but I have no opinion on that, just generally not finding feet attractive and I can honestly say I have never considered the question before. I consider it for a few moments and realize I have no values that would allow me to formulate an opinion on it. So then I fall back to, would an average foot lover find my feet more or less attractive than average? I still have no idea. So then I fall back to a meta strategy, ok if I am going to answer questions stating my opinion when I have no opinion, what should I do? Alternate answers? Always answer that I am better? Always answer that I am worse? I understand that they are interested in what the distribution is going to be after people answer the questions so someone hedging is not giving helpful information.
I decided that my strategy was to leave the website. I was curious if anyone else found being presented with a binary choice for an estimate at a continuous random variable off putting. I would have been much more willing to give a confidence interval around some abstract mean.
That's interesting. Most of the other ones sit somewhere in the 40%-60%, but this is the only one I've seen where most people pick the "good" trait over the bad to such a high degree. I guess this says something about Hacker News.
EDIT: you can see the full list of questions and answers as well, and it’s more interesting than just what I wrote above.
I wonder if and how things cluster around age, income, country of residence, etc.
What I'd really be interested in is a set of tags people can click as far as "which of these do you strongly identify with?" And then just have some broad categories that are ostensibly independent such as "investing", "politics", "exercise & fitness", "video or board games", "charity/volunteering", "night clubs/partying", "theater & the arts", "sci-fi or fantasy", "religion", "travelling/siteseeing", "meditation" ...
I'd assume most to be total noise but there may be a few interesting strong correlations that could inspire further study.
Moreover, if you ask your sex partners on the number of partners they have had, on the average their number is higher than yours. Again, it is not that you are a loser - it's the friendship paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox.
I saw better than average at maths around 68%... and that might be true for the kind of people who play this game. Dancing and sex might be the same story (didn't see those questions).
I reckon this is due to only watching apex males perform those acts. As opposed to maths where you probably remember your classmates struggling and were actually tested for your ability.
Made me laugh. Obviously skewed demographics, but entertaining nonetheless.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That guideline is not there because we don't know how annoying HN comments can be, but because we do know. Reacting by adding snark or denunciation to the threads just makes things even worse.
The only response that really helps, in reaction to bad or unsubstantive or obvious comments, is to post good, substantive, non-obvious ones.
Maybe that's the point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox
For example, if you go to a gym, you are probably among the weakest in the room. Simply because the strongest are more likely to be those who go to the gym the most and therefore, the ones you are most likely to encounter.
If you hit the dance floor, the same happens, and as expected, most people think they are below average dancers. In fact, the worst dancers may not dance at all, so you can't compare yourself to them.
It would be interesting to see how often those who are actually less than average said they were more and vice versa.