Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by clwk 1521 days ago
"Most believe themselves 'above average' at most things."
1 comments

Most people have an above-average number of legs.

There's really no contradiction there; all it takes is for there to be a couple low scores pulling the average down.

> Most people have an above-average number of legs.

The arithmetic mean and the median are both averages, but the upthread comment was about the median and yours about the arithmetic mean.

> There's really no contradiction there; all it takes is for there to be a couple low scores pulling the average down.

Well, no, when what you are estimating is relative performance by score percentiles, and people's self evaluation is biased toward the 70th percentile, that's not what is happening.

In the context of the paper, we should be talking about the median, not the mean.