Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Fri, 04 Jul 2008 12:06:01 +0100, Invisible wrote:
>>
>>> Worrying fact: 50% of the population has below-average intelligence.
>>> (!!!)
> 
> So... If we have 4 men, with intelligences 1, 8, 9 and 9, the average is 
> (1+8+9+9)/4=6,75, so 75% of men are more intelligent than average person 
> (who, if he existed, would be over 6 times as intelligent as the dumpest 
> one).
> 
We were talking about a population, unless you can come up with a very 
good reason why certain extreme intelligences are more likely than 
others you may assume the distribution is gaussian 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem).

For a counter example: as part of an introduction to databases and 
statistics we used to measure height and weight of all first year 
medical students to let them work with their own data. (getting some 
girls to stand on scales was an interesting exercise). Often the 
distribution of their heights was camel shaped.

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