[robomc]

> misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);

this one would be surprising though

[ls612]

Intelligence doesn’t have much skewness in its distribution so the mean is approximately the median.

[nerdponx]

Right, but that's less and assumption about basic statistical literacy than it is about a particular distribution that happens to describe the data. Many things in society and nature are not symmetric around their means.

[asynchronous]

Also a bad statistical statement, because the way it is phrased implies that the average is being taken from the whole world, rather than just America.