The Myth of Average

your side, the pants on. Yeah, you go to a you go to the restaurant, certainly in the States, do you order your meal comes on a giant plate? Right, that's the amount of food that feeds the the the average person, and so you're supposed to eat it, all right, everybody wants that giant plate of food. Actually, I was at a restaurant not too long ago and there was a British woman next to me, and she started just talking about how terrible it is United Stay. It's like

the giant portions. And I had never really thought about it because I'm so used to that restaurant dining, and I thought she's right, Yeah, bring you out of a bowl of something and it's it's it should be in the middle of a table with a family of four or five dining on it, but no, instead it's your your personal trough of food. Yeah, it's United States one's size fits all meal, just for you. And that's where it gets into this idea of of um, this kind

of like what is average? This question is there really an average? And this bell curve that we have all been introduced to in primary school, elementary school and onward tends to kind of rule our lives even after we've left school, right, and we're gonna look at We're gonna look into this idea today. This this myth of average. Yeah, if you want to imagine the bell curve here, um, And certainly we're gonna have varying degrees of familiarity with this,

but it's basically looks like a bell. It's it's a it's a it's a line, and then the line is going sort of flat, and then it curves up and then it curves back down again. And the idea here is that is that on a performance standpoint, as far as the statistics of performance, the idea is that you have a very small group that is underperforming, that's at the very bottom. And then you have a small group that is just really performing at a high level and

they're at the top. And then you have this larger group in the middle and they that is the realm of the average. Yes, bell curves are normal probability distributions, and that's what I think it's interesting about this probability because we take this kind of distribution and we use them in real world scenarios, which we'll talk about in

a second. But what you just just described is this idea that we have an equivalent number of people above and below average, and that there's a very small number of people who are two standard deviations above and below the average. So if you're thinking about that plotted out on that line, that Bell curve, then those those outliers would be the people who are super high achievers and people who are at the very low ends of achievement. Yeah. So like from a from a corporate standpoint, most of

your company is going to be in the middle. That's where most of your money and resources are going, just because that's where the most people are. But that small percentage of the top, those are the ones that are that there, there's really a lot of potential for those are the ones that are really bring innovative ideas and high performance to the table. And then that the bottom, the outliers, outliers at the very bottom. Uh, those are the ones that you're going to want to cut uh

and and regularly cut those. That's the slack that you want to get rid of to tighten up the rope. Yeah. Indeed, and we use this again, this is just a probability distribution in these real world scenarios to decide how well children are learning, which dictates how and what they learned. We use it to assess workplace performance and don't racist.

And that's where it becomes sort of like, let's let's look at this model a little bit closer, because we have now reverse engineered a budget based on the Bell curve, and it could be that the Bell curve is quite off. In fact, research conducted in two thousand and eleven and two thousand and twelve by Ernest oh Boyle Jr. And Herman Agwynas examined the performance of more than six hundred and thirty thousand people involved in four areas of human performance.

Academics writing so writing papers athletes at the professional and collegiate levels, politicians, and entertainers. And they found that performance and of these groups did not follow a normal distribution, did not follow the Bell curve. Rather, those groups fell into what is called a power law distribution. And according to a Forbes magazine article the Myth of the Bell Curve, this power law to attribution is also known as a long tale because we're looking at a picture of it

right now. If you think about um a rectangle and one side of that rectangle being a sort of tale, that's more of the distribution. They say that is in keeping with what is really going on, that's reflecting reality. And they say that most people fall below the mean, and roughly ten to of the population are above the average and often far above the average, and a large population are slightly below average, in a small group are

far below average. So they say that this idea of average is actually pretty meaningless when you think about what's happening in real time. Yeah, and I mean it's even it's even worse than meaningless when you start looking at the idea that, rather than describing how we perform and and really being a telling model of human behavior and human potential, the Bell curve might actually be constraining our performance. They work creating that we're taking the statistical model of

human behavior and trying to shoehorn our actual behavior into it. Yeah, I mean, because think about a company or a classroom, and let's say that the company classrooms, Um, they're full of hyper performers. Okay, Let's say nineteen out of the twenty kids like they're performing at crazy rates. Okay, they are still going to be graded on the Bell curve. Let's say that nineteen of the twenty employees at a

workplace are hyper performers. They're still gonna their raises. Their performance are still gonna be doled out based on the Bell curve because again, that budget has been reverse engineered, so there's only a certain amount of money and percentages that are going to be distributed across that performance. So a lot of people lose out in the scenarios. And basically it's saying, here is a model for what performance

should look like. If you don't recognize that model in the group that you're judging, then you must be making a mistake. So even in that group of high performers at a company, you in end up having to rate some high performers as average, and and some average of performers as as low performers. And you're and that's just

gonna end up hurting morale and and driving away talented individuals. Yeah, which is not to say that the idea of universal design, which is basically we're talking about here when we talk about Bell curve model, isn't helpful, because it is right. We can talk about universal design in the ways that our streets are laid out right or even um like catching utensils that are made for any size hand, not

just a giant hand or a small hand. Um. But it's not so great when you actually talk about the individual him or herself, and you have companies, institutions, education, um, trying to mandate a sort of universal paradigm to place over it. And so this brings us to a new idea, to a new movement kind of revolutionary approach, and that is to to ban the to to throw the idea of the average out, to say, hey, this institutional model should not is false and should not dictate how we

organize our lives and our industries and our educational system. Yeah. And the biggest proponent of this idea, of this man. The average is Todd Rose, who's a faculty member at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He talked about how in nineteen fifty two the U. S. Air Force had a problem. They had really good pilots flying better planes, all this money that they had sunk into better planes, but they

were getting worse results and they didn't know why. And finally they figured out that it had to deal with the design of the cockpit, which was designed based on the average man. And they had an Air Force researcher by the name of Gilbert Daniels who conducted a study and found that none as zero of the four thousand pilots were average on all of the ten dimensions of

size that he measured on them. We're talking about height, shoulders, chest, waste its legs, uh, their reach, right torso, neck, and thighs. And he proved that there was no such thing as an average pilot, but that they have a jagged size profile, so no one is the same one every single dimension. And just because let's say you might be the average height, it doesn't mean that you're the average weight or you

have the average torso length. And so the Air Force took that information and they decided to ban the average and they refused to buy fighter jets where the cockpit was made for the average pilot, and instead they wanted them to design to what they called the edges of dimensions of size, so saying basically, hey, we're gonna have tall pilots, we're gonna have short pilots. We need you to design with these extremes in mind, instead of just saying, hey,

this is the average person. One size fits all, which is not the kind of mandate that that that anyone wants to hear in the manu factoring industry, because one size fits all is a good system if you are making a screw driver, if you're making you know, to your point, you know, just some sort of ikea part or or or standard furniture product to go in your house exactly. I mean, that's the whole manufacturing business is based on that. But here you have like this really

expensive equipment. You want it to be interacted with in the correct way, and then all has to do with dimensions. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you have high performers who need to use a high performance aircraft and you need to you need these two need to meet. It reminds me a lot of our relationship with computers, and not just computers, like even just like desk equipment in general, but everything

everything that surrounds computing. The idea that that the computing experience should be made as human as possible, so that humans can use the machine, can use the software, can use the chair and the table, everything involved in the office environment. That they should be able to use it without wearing themselves to the level of the machine. The machine should meet that the human user, not the other way around. And so here we see the same idea

with with with with institutions, with with with design in general. Yeah, and that's what Todd Rose says. He says that just like size, each student, every single one of them, has a jagged learning profile, meaning they have strengths through average at some things, and they have weaknesses. He says, we all do, even geniuses have weaknesses. And he says, if you design those learning environments on average, odds are you've designed them for nobody. He says, so, no, wonder we

have a problem. We've created learning environments that, because they are designed on average, cannot possibly do what we expected

them to do, which is nurture individual potential. And he talks about how we are in a very unique situation right now technologically because we can serve the individual We can serve the individual student and the way that they learn and follow those jagged profiles by giving them an iPad, in giving them different programs to bolster learning in the areas that they're a week or if they were really really high performers been challenging them with supplementation also provided

by technology. And he's spot on about this, I think, because what he's saying is that schools, they spent an enormous amount of money on iPads. I think he said that they're like the second largest customer of um or consumer of iPads, and at least in the United States. So if you have the technology at your disposal, if you are spending the money, why not begin to work with the possibilities of what those programs can offer on

an individual level. Because we had talked about in our podcast about Finland and why they're turning out such incredibly well rounded, smart kids who only have one test, one mandatory test at age of sixteen. It's because they're serving those kids at the individual level, and they're spending less than the United States is on education per child to

do that. You know, I can't help but think back to the wire when we're talking about this, mainly because creator David Simon has often stated that that that in that show, you essentially have a Greek tragedy, but instead of gods, you have institutions, because institutions are the gods of modern society. And so in in this topic, we we kind of have to ask the question what kind of god suits, uh, the denizen of the modern world better.

One is the personal god that is is involved in your life and uh and and wants to mold you. And the other is this abstract, distant god. And to reach that god, you have to change yourself. You have to jump through the hoops of of religious ritual to possibly interact with it. Oh my gosh. And as we always say, it goes back to the Platonic ideal and Plato and this idea that we're all just, you know,

these cheap copies of perfection. But you know, we've decided that we're cheap copies on the on the bell curve instead of you know, on the jagged edge of dimensions. And this even relates to healthcare. If you think about health insurance, which sanctions, treatments, and the myth of average

can really put people at a disadvantage. Here Rose says that if you look at the area of cancer, you see an exponential increase in effective research and treatment when the individual with all of his or her genetic predispositions, diet and environment is considered as opposed to just hey, here's this, here's how we approach cancer, this in this very universal way. And he said that's it's really only when you get down to the individual level that you're

making progress. And if you think about it, um even a drug therapies, and this is from the case for Impersonalized Medicine the third edition. It says many patients do not benefit from the first drug they are offered in treatment. For example, of depression patients, arthritis patients, asthma patients, and of diabetic patients will not respond to initial treatment. And we know initial treatment is something that is offered because based on the average that they have, that is the

thing that they think will work the best. Right, and it sounds good on paper, right, treat the average patient and then adjust accordingly based on the feedback. Yeah, except as as it seems as mounting evidence would seem to show us this average is indeed a myth. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk a little more about this topic and even read a few listener mails. Hey we're back, and we're of course talking about the myth of average.

We're talking about what happens when you have these have an institutional model of human performance, and then you start trying to live your life and and have the whole culture work around those models, and the and the the growing revelation that this average person that everything is centered around doesn't really exist. Yeah. And the thing too is that this system is just completely permeated culture. Right, it's systemic.

There is there to stay it with. Seems so Todd Rose one of one of the things that he really wants to do is to try to take this apart a bit and look more towards the individual talent method. And he has something called the Variability Project, and his idea is that you have this, you know, this system in place for a hundred and fifty years based on averages trying to understand individuals, and you have to now take this information about the myth of average and try

to rework it. And so he says, there are three broad challenges data, models, and the nature of science to address the science of the individual reaching its full potential in all different fields. So what he's doing may seem a little bit pine in the sky right now because it's it's UH. I say that only because again it's very systemaic. This this UM, this average idea and Bell curve that's in place. So that's there's so many different fields that he has to try to get into and influence.

That being said, he and his organization are starting to provide papers on the topic and really trying to educate people, UM, why why this is sort of erroneous thinking, and how you can get to students, to workers, UM, to health care treatments in a much more effective way, you know. And just just to go back to A. Gwynas for

a second. One of the authors on that two thousand and twelve study UM he described the Bell curve as as possibly being accurate in describing human performance in the presence of an external constraint UH, such as an assembly line.

You have simply line their parts moving by, and you have skilled workers doing their bit to UH to contribute to the finished air conditioning unit at the end of the line, right, but you're gonna have talented individuals on there who are not who could work faster if not held back by the pace of the line, by the the the outside constraint that is applied to them by the institution. Yeah, and it's really the institution is key here.

And it's interesting to think about this because you're thinking, Okay, this is about manufacturing, right, could this possibly apply to sort of like the Krendl crem of higher education? Could IVY Leagues be a kind of assembly line. Well, there's an excellent article on this by David Brooks that published online in The Atlantic. Of course it's The Atlantic, so it's it's really long but very thorough breakdown of the state of higher education, especially as as it relates to

IVY Lee For instance. He argues that, uh, that that right now, we kind of have the convergence of two models. There's the older model where to get into an IVY League school you had to be somebody a very you know, class based model and to have the clout to get in. And then you have the newer model to to get into an IVY League school. To get into it, to be a high achiever in society. You had to be

an overachiever. You had to just work and work and work the right person, Yeah, you had to be the right person as opposed to the being from the right class. So they end up in this environment where they're just they're just performing at a high level all the time. They're expected and expecting themselves to just knock get out of the park, assignment after assignment, project after project. Uh,

just domino after domino. Right. And as as as Brooks says in the PC says quote, learning is supposed to be about falling down and getting up again until you do it right. But in an academic culture that demands constant achievement, failures seem so perilous that the best and brightest often spend their young years in terrariums of excellence. Uh. And this is what author William Dershowitz, who's a former professor of English at Yale, terms a violent aversion to risk.

So you can imagine where you were an institution like this would produce an individual that could go on to achieve great things within a similar institution, you know, the right kind of uh, financial firm, etcetera, where there again, are are these dominoes to knock down one after the other. But that kind of individual, of that kind of thinking that's been in a sense institutionalized by the the Ivy League system is not going to perform well in other

areas of society. Yeah, Derschwitz, he has a book called Excellent Sheep, and he says that the Ivy League is churning out students who are super people, alien species. I think that one's fair. Uh, and bionic hamsters. I mean this, this is rough stuff here, But again I think bion a canster matches up with some people I've met that would fit that moment camps up. It's kind of awesome in a way. Yeah, I'm gonna put that on my resume.

I'm not there. You go, and he says, as you said, that system manufactured students who are smart and talented and driven, but they're also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and stunted sense of purpose, trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction. Great at what they're doing, but no idea why they're doing it. And so I think it kind of goes back down to that whole individual versus universal level, because at the

individual level, as Brooks has said, there is failure. You must fail, you must fail and get up and do it again in order to learn and find purpose. But at the universal level and at the university level, there is only success. That is what the big push is right, just to succeed and not to individualize the content that

you are are taking in. So you could even say that it's just all about regurgitation as opposed to percolating on something, permeating your worldview and figuring it out for yourself. What doesn't matter to you as a person. So again I can't help but come back to that to David Simon's about institutions as God's and this, uh, this idea that we don't want that distant God that requires us to jump through hoops and jump through ritual We we

want this institutional God that that sees us as an individual. Yeah, And I find actually a lot of comfort in this idea of the myth of the average, because you know, too often I think we we hear the statistic of you fall into this category in that category, and we're so completely categorized and labeled that we don't necessarily follow the individual path for ourselves. And I think this is

a very subconscious thing. In fact, I think all of us, if you, if you thought yourself for a moment, do I subconsciously seed myself to a kind of average out there or an idea of what is average? Um? I think all of us would probably say, yeah, there's a certain sort of standard. But I hold myself to and the you know, I guess the idea is that that standard is built of myths, right, So it's very interesting

to look at it that way. And I even think about some of the science reporting that we do sometimes, because you know, we're creating these narratives and these stories about what's happening and how we move through the world and why we do what we do. But you can't even just take one study or you know, one certain aspect of it and say that this is a universal truth. It's just sort of coloring the perception of of a

greater narrative of what's going on. And I think sometimes it's just it's so easy for us to want to take that easy, simple structure that Bell curve and apply it to our life and get that answer. Now. Indeed, indeed, there's a certain comfort in that I mean, whoot. Have you ever met someone who said, I would like to be a statistic, I would like to be representative of a statistic. I feel like I have heard people make that that plea, uh, when it's beneficial to be a statistic.

That is true, Yeah, that is true. But you know, most of us don't want to be treated like a statistic right now. Like I said, I think most people want that that. They don't want the impersonal institutional God, they want the personal one. And that ultimately is the model that makes the most sense in terms of meeting the individual, in terms of getting the most out of the individual, you know, as far as performance goes, and

just how we work as human beings. Indeed, and especially when you look at it these in larger constructs like education or healthcare or corporations, it really does begin to matter to again the individual. Alright. Well, on that note, I'm going to call over the robot here and we're gonna gonna do a couple of quick list their mails. All right. This one comes to us from Peter Kron, who is a long time listener to the show. UH and UH runs the Elecord record label King de Luxe. UH.

So he has some stuff here to add in about happiness. Uh. And I mentioned the record labl stuff because it kind of plays into what he's talking about here. He says, I just listened to the Happiness podcast, uh, the Mathematics of happiness uh, and couldn't stop thinking about this dichotomy between short term and long term happy. So now I thought i'd come in a bit. What you were saying about luring expectations and yet shooting for the moon both

makes sense, but they're at odds with each other. I think you guys nailed it on the head with being realistic about things, although maybe there's two layers, one super super ambitious layer of expectations in another base level. I think though they tie together. What long term satisfaction is often based upon. With for example, big art projects is

peer review. You can try to create something truly grand and in the back or front of your mind, expect people the wow over it the second it's released to the public, but then in execution it gets watered down over and over until it barely resembles what one set out to make, or it just evolved. You no longer expect the same reaction. In fact, sometimes artists end up hating it at the point of release, in part because of overexposure, but also because they felt like they swung

and missed. But then the reaction far surpasses the new expectations and the artist starts feeling great about their work and build warm memories about the overall experience. In other words, it's complicated. Well, and it just reminded me of of when we've talked about memory and the role of memory and taking that memory out and reframing that memory. And so when you talk about the long term, you are talking about long term memory and that sort of hindsight.

So happiness becomes even more complicated in that sense. Indeed, Yeah, I mean as we as we we really you know, try to drive home in that that episode and in other episodes we've talked about happiness and finding, you know, some level of nmity in your life. It's it's difficult because it's our life is not one constant state. It's one state after the other. It's this up and down.

That's our t shirt happiness period. It's difficulty, Alright. This one comes to us from Brian Brian Writeson and says, hey, I just listen to your podcast over breakfast as is my custom. When I was thinking about adult lullabies and how we seem to prefer ones that feature morbidity, I was instantly reminded of the podcast Welcome to night Vale, in which the silky voice Cecil Southey explains the bizarre and often horrifying news that occurs in the fictional town

of night Vale. While I myself don't listen to it while following asleep for fear of missing anything in the story, I know that a great many of my friends do. They claim it helps them greatly. Anyway, if you're not familiar with Welcome to night Vale, I highly suggest you check it out. I suspect Robert in particular it would

be fond of it. Keep up the great work. I love that because that analogy is perfect to lullabies because the night Vale they really, I mean he Cecil is talking about these horrific events, which again are told in this just lullaby hushing voice, and it really sort of ramps up the creepiness. But also there you go. I mean, that's the same thing that lullabies are doing when we sing this into a little infant's ears right about, you know, their their cradle rocking over in them spilling out. Yeah,

I have I have checked out night Vale before. It is it isn't a very interesting and unique podcast. Um, I haven't had the chance to really dive into it, but I had a solo drive several months back, and I loaded up on podcasts and I ended up spending a long period driving through the dark, through the cold rain and listening to like the first four episodes, and I was, I was, I was really impressed. It's one of those works that I feel like, Oh man, I wish I had come up with that. I wish I could.

It's such a it's such a great concept and great execution. Yeah. So indeed, you know, listen to us in the morning over breakfast as Brian does, and then at the night at night, maybe consider listening to night Vale. All right, So there you have it. Um, Hey, you want to check out more episodes, You want to check out that the cergical wings thing we just mentioned here, Head on

over the Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Click on that podcast tab and you'll find all the podcast episodes we've ever done, going back to the very beginning, all streaming there. Many of the more recent ones also include art and links out to relate content on our side and elsewhere. You can also find UM links out to our social media accounts there as well as videos as well as blog posts and hey, be sure to check us out on YouTube where we are mind Stuff Show.

And on the topic of myth of averages, do you feel like any of that rings true to you in terms of the classroom or at work or any other institution that you've been involved with? UM? Is that kind of one of those things that, once you become aware of, you begin to see your experience filtered through this kind of mythical average. Let us know your thoughts on that, and you can do that by sending us an email at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com.

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