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A comment on “Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong”. Parent comment

Re:“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong” by sokoloff on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @08:37AM (#32410896)
That's the median. The "average" (when used undecorated/unspecified) generally means the mean.

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).

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Re:“Autistic people can’t acknowledge when they’re wrong” by jcranmer on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @09:17AM (#32411407)
> The "average" (when used undecorated/unspecified) generally means the mean.

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.

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