To think some people are so thick it’s almost beyond parody

No that is the mean - the average can be mean, median or mode.

And I see that it's been explained in much greater detail upthread, so 😏

No, not quite. Averages work by adding the total then dividing by units. This works even if the spread is uneven
Think you mean the median, which sits exactly in the middle of a distribution.

I have to go to our satellite office in Bedfordshire about once a fortnight and I drive past a house with a flag outside that says “Stop the boats.” I always wonder what the owner thinks this sends as a message especially given the distance from any boats at all, save for the odd barge maybe.

Gosh I’ve had this recently. A (distant) relative (related through marriage) is convinced the earth is flat - the discussion was bought on by the NASA updates.

Honestly I’m in shock.

I think it’s not easy when you realise there are more people without common sense, than those with.

OK- to be more accurate when walking down the street 😁. She did disapprove of entering pubs though, but back then "respectable" women didn't frequent them.(1950s)

Classic!

I would not say that many people are stupid exactly, just that the majority of hunans are often shallow, unthinking, and lack curiosity for anything outside what they already know about. They often have an instictive, emotion driven initial reaction to something and dont think beyond that.

Although we like to think humans are rational logical creatures, with some exceptions , we mostly are not. We are generally motivated and driven by instinct, emotion and stories, rather than logic, and facts.

It is hard work to go against our nature and most people cant see the value in putting in that work . I'm reluctant to call it lazy as many people who are like this, work very hard at things they value.. They just see no value in putting in the effort to understand things that are hard to understand. They think of it as boring.

This lack of thinking then becomes a habit and they really can't think properly and critically about what this sentence
actually means.

I notice a trend amongst some women younger than me, locally - quite an affluent area, lots of Defenders and sports cars etc - who actively cultivate a persona of Trophy Wag. Identikit faces and an utterly active aversion to expressing an opinion on anything beyond aesthetics. Their partners are not dissimilar - a hefty dash of toxic masculinity thrown in, and I’m very certain, a lot of coke.

I find them horrifically fascinating.

I voted YABU for the reason you gave ie: Are people genuinely this stupid or are they keen to shoehorn their political views into literally anything?

Rude, possibly. Ableist, no. Being stupid is not a disability. Having a learning disability is. Different things.
HTH.

Before this goes any further let anybody who would like to focus on the semantics of statistics like to pause and consider if there is an accurate and universally agreed numeric definition of intelligence? And no . I.q. is not that.
Sometimes it's the question that is flawed and it makes the subsequent argument inconsiquential.

It’s everywhere. People don’t read things properly but get angry about issues nonetheless.

I have to stop myself from replying to such ignorant replies as it’s just a waste of my time.

Both thick AND determined to push an agenda.

And of the half below the median, many of them will be exactly as intelligent as the median (eg the number set 2,7,8,8,8,8,8,8,10,15).

No it’s not, intelligence is distributed along a bell curve. So if the average IQ is 100, then 50% of people won’t be below that a a lot of people will have an IQ of 100 and will be exactly average intelligence. In fact, 68% of people have an average IQ.

(I have a maths and statistics degree, PP is massively oversimplifying how averages work. It’s highly likely that the mode, mean and median averages of intelligence will be close to each other, and if we use mode, then by definition 50% wouldn’t be below it).

The temperature in my house averages 18 degrees across a year. It’s not less than 18 degrees Celsius in 50% of the days, it’s in fact 18 degrees on almost every day of the year, and on the odd day it’s 17 or 19.

Well yeah - didn't want to derail the whole thing too much by getting into the problems with the IQ test, which is a slightly different category to entirely quantifiable and provable things like your height / salary / number of buttons etc etc. I've heard it said that what it really measures is "adaptation to modernity"; those of us who do well on IQ tests would probably score poorly on the things that matter in life if you are, say, a Masai tribesperson living a traditional nomadic life. There's a lot of cultural bias, before we even get started on the purely mathematical issues with it.

Yeah, anyone under about 120 seems frustratingly slow to me. But then I struggle with a lot of the stuff that lots of people seem to find easy... there are many different kinds of intelligence.

YANBU

Honestly it scares me at times.

@Elsvieta, I keep reminding myself not to reply to this in any of its manifestations. Sometimes the urge's too strong.

The IQ bell curve is symmetrical. This is because the test is designed explicitly to give half the results below 100, half above (ignoring the 100s). Since you like stats, it's easier to remind you that 100 is an INDEX, not an absolute score of any sort.

And everyone scoring 100 or below is thick. I said it 😏

The poster still thinks she was correct, but she wasn't, and that's not how averages work.

There are three terms to understand here: mean, median and mode.

Mean is the mathematical term for average.
Median is the one right in the middle of any group of numbers, if you lined them up in order.
Mode is the number that occurs most frequently.

Let's suppose we have eleven people and they all have some buttons. The number of buttons they have is:

5,6,8,8,9,9,9,9,10,11,12.

The mean (average) number they have is all those numbers added together (96) divided by the eleven people you have. So 8.72 (for these purposes we can stop at 2 decimal places). Look at the list of numbers above. Four of those people are below the average and seven are above it. The median number is the one in the middle (so 9) and the mode is the one that occurs the most often (also 9).

Now let's say the numbers of buttons are as follows:

2,2,3,3,3,3,8,9,14,18,19.

The mean is 84 divided by 11, so 7.63. Look at the list: 6 people below the mean (average), 5 above. The median is 3 and so is the mode.

One more group of eleven and their buttons:

2,3,4,5,6,8,9,10,11,14,14.

The mean is 86 divided by 11, so 7.81. Five people below that number and six above. The median is 8 and the mode is 14.

It might sometimes be exactly half the people (or numbers, or whatever it is) are above the average and half below. But usually not. Because the people (or numbers, or whatever) don't all deviate from the median by the same amount. That's the key to understanding it. (I think. It can be hard to understand why others don't understand things that seem obvious to oneself. But I think so). And sometimes mean and median can be the same, or median and mode, or mode and mean, or all three, etc. But by no means always.

The median is the one in the middle (i.e. if you could line up everyone in the country by IQ, the one stood at the exact halfway point would have the median IQ). Exactly half of people are above / below the median. Not the mode.

A good rule of thumb is to remember how stupid our population is on average, and then remember that half of those people are even more stupid than you think to get to the average.

It's when they've used ChatGPT to answer a question where the answer is painfully bleedin' obvious that gets me. 'What time is the six o clock news on tonight?' 'ChatGPT says....'

Oh. My. God 🤦‍♀️

Equally prevalent are the ones who refuse to believe that humans can write meaningful prose, so it must be a chatbot.

And the ones who, when someone says they used a bot to clarify their ideas (often because they're EFL), will just keep going on at them for using the technology.

Thinking about it, it's probably more that 'ChatGPT invalidates everything!' is one of their many fixed ideas, which they feel impelled to post on endless repeat.

I genuinely love the variety of humans but, gods, it's hard to take sometimes!

I used to manage holiday cottages before I retired. I honestly don’t know how some people get through life. Many, many people are utterly dense.

I always used to think that the 'thick' people were others, somehow, a long way away from me. And then I went out with a man who was genuinely - not thick, he could function perfectly well, but he had some quite extraordinarily uninformed shall we say, ideas. He used to look at the mugshots in the paper of people arrested for various offences and say 'well, you can tell they were no good, just look at them.' I pointed out that a) he already KNEW they'd been arrested so was biased, and b) NOBODY looks good in a mug shot! But no, he maintained that you could tell the bad guys just by looking.

I did point out that if this was true the police could save themselves a lot of time by just arresting all non-smiling, tattooed men with short hair. He did not get it.