>> [1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.
I don't know why more than half. Can you explain?
You can't be stupider than a rock, but there seems to be no upper definite upper limit to human intelligence.
Hence the IQ curve isn't a Gaussian. It isn't symmetric. The average is dragged upwards by very-high-IQ people, above the median.
This is like a billionaire moving to some tiny country town. The average income suddenly becomes much higher, but the typical (median) income doesn't budge.
Rich people is a useful analogy to the point I'm trying to make.
When I was on holidays in Vietnam, my chauffeur was horrified to hear that I was too tired and that I wanted to skip a pre-paid dinner reservation at a "fancy" restaurant and that I preferred to simply go to my hotel and crash. That fancy dinner was something like $20. To him that's a lot of money. To me it's nothing. Meanwhile I hear about rich Saudis abandoning italian supercars because they're "broken" in the same way my kid throws away broken toys.
Intelligence and wealth are vaguely similar. People used to a certain level just can't wrap their heads around how people at different levels do things.
I assure you this does not seem to be the case.
There is an observed, and inexact, upper limit on human intelligence, just as there is with human height, and for broadly similar reasons: gravity, in the case of height, and for intelligence some much more hand-wavey limit to the amount of neurons and dendritic links a human body can construct inside a skull which has to fit through hips which are capable of bipedal motion.
(Some of you are curious, and yes, there is a real correlation between skull volume and measured intelligence, but let's not bust out the calipers because it's a bad proxy for something we can measure more accurately with tests).
Hence the IQ curve is, in fact, Gaussian, just as human height is, despite the fact that you can't be shorter than a mushroom, and the Empire State Building is an existence proof of very tall things.
But to conclude from this that most are below average, wouldn't you have to know that the high IQs pull the average up more than the low IQs pull it down? I don't see how the mere assumption that there's no upper limit gets you there (not to mention that this assumption is bound to be wrong anyway). But as you say, maybe there's a reason I'm in the big half...
I guess I'm in the bottom half, then; I thought the average was that quantity for which half are below, and half are above.
A distribution which is biased towards high-side outliers (such as wealth or income) will generally have more than half of the population below the mean.
It's not at all obvious to me that general intelligence has such a distribution (and I can think of plenty of physical mechanisms [injury, disease, malnutrition during development] by which the opposite could easily be true).
I wouldn't say that. Most population statistics--think "average" wages and the like--tend to use median. And when we're talking about intelligence, this isn't something that is readily quantifiable with a number. IQ is explicitly normalized so that 100 is median, and 110 is one standard deviation above median. "mean IQ" isn't a meaningful concept. Given that we can't even measure "mean intelligence", average intelligence tends to mean median intelligence in practice.
That said, the GP is just being obtuse. I'm not sure if he meant intelligence is non bell-shaped or some other reasons and I'm dumb too :-).
Mean, median and mode. Though it's true that people usually mean 'mean' when they say 'average'.
While reading the article, I had the distinct feeling the author was not, in fact, autistic, but merely had a lack of social practice.
I dont think I was being dismissive of anyone, but is it really necessary to call all of life's difficulties some kind of disorder? Does making it a disorder some how legitimize someone's struggles? I don't think so.
I think doubting someone is Autistic based on virtually no information would be considered pretty dismissive
You tell me, when I grew up being called autistic I tried to hide the disorder and get my teachers to not know I had it. It was everybody else who insisted on the names disorder, and it did legitimize it in their eyes. It meant a LOT of funding money, an extra teacher in the classroom, overall favourable treatment relative to other students. It was alternatively used as a pretence to discriminate against me. It was used to guarantee me accommodations. It was used as a means of getting a poor family money.
Lots of people have lots of different motivations for using that word. What I do know is there isn’t really any scientific basis for the idea that only severe autism is somehow real though.
The word autism does legitimize one’s struggles though, and people recognize that legitimacy. It’s pretty sick.
The reason "Spectrum" is in the name is because there is a wide range of ways it can manifest - from very severe on one end to less impactful (and in some ways beneficial depending on context) on the other. People who used to be referred to as having Asperger Syndrome for example are normally highly intelligent and capable individuals, many of whom you'd have no idea had Autism if you met them.
Please do not continue to spread this kind of thinking - it is very antiquated. I also don't know why you would doubt someone is Autistic based on a single blog post.
This is not to diminish anyone's suffering. There's also a danger of taking false refuge in a syndrome that can be equally demoralizing and even paralyzing. No one should be defined by their diseases or medical conditions.
Asperger's was removed from the DSM for somewhat opaque reasons, and then, contemporary Discourse being what it is, some people decided the term was offensive, and we no longer use it.
Which is good for the people [citation needed] who are autistic and find the string "Asperger's" offensive, but bad for discourse, since one must either specify "high functioning autism" or "autism as highly-intelligent nerds are likely to encounter it in a professional context", and if you leave it out, someone will be along to point out that this condition shares a name with adults who wear helmets when they leave the house.
If it were me, I wouldn't categorize my peers in the same category as adults who wear helmets and diapers. It just doesn't seem like the same thing. But, fortunately, categorizing mental diversity and pathology is not my job.
It was... fun to watch him take university lecturers down a peg or two.
The linked article is by someone who is clearly very knowledgeable about specific topics in the same way.
How many IT people do you know who attend conferences?
An uncomfortable truth we all pretend to ignore is that more than half the population is below average intelligence.[1]
The comments in this blog post don't just apply to autistic people, but apply equally to people that are simply less wrong than average.
An observation I made is that some people make correct statements approximately 90% of the time. This is waaaay above the typical, which is more like 30-40%.
Typical people assume that everyone else is typical, because that's what typical means. Average people are average, and the Bell curve is the tallest in the middle. So when they encounter someone who isn't typical (not just autistic), they assume that their behaviour is arrogant, because someone who is right 35% of the time and talks like they're right 90% of the time must be arrogant!
Someone who is right 90% of the time faces an endless series of accusations of being overbearing, arrogant, self-important, not-a-team-player, or not "giving in" as in the blog post. Being contrary, argumentative, or not taking the blame to a sufficient degree are commonly said as well.
Speaking of giving in, most people follow the ten-thousand-year-old[2] tradition of doing whatever the grey-haired tribe leader says. Authority over correctness. Toe the line. Know your place. Keep your head down. Don't rock the boat. Part of the team.
The thing is, being old doesn't mean much, especially in a time of exponential change. In fact, the older you are, the more wrong your rules-of-thumb are, often exponentially wrong. This leads to endless fun conflicts of opinion where the young inexperienced buck is actually entirely correct in disregarding decades of experience[3]. But that leads to ostracism and exclusion, because we're all human, which is to say that we're basically strategically shaved gorillas in suits.
[1] If you don't know why more than half, well... umm... I have some bad news for you about which half you might be in.
[2] Did I say ten kiloyears? I meant megayears. Sorry. This is what we've been doing since before we were human. It's wired into us deep.
[3] A random example from very recently is that I had to explain with pictures to senior management that upgrading the WAN links for one hundred sites from 2 Mbps to 4 Mbps and locking in that telco contract for 5 years is a mistake three zeroes in size.