Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren't Average

Here's the story on NPR:
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/03/151860154/put-away-the-bell-curve-most-of-us-arent-average

And the associated research article: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2011.01239.x/full

Now discuss!

Mmm, is there a statistician in the house? Did a competent statistician review this paper, do you think? I'm not one, but it does strike me that it may be important that in a group of Emmy nominees it isn't possible to have been nominated less than 1 time, and in the whole population it isn't possible to have been nominated less than 0 times! In fact, I don't see how on earth anyone could have claimed with a straight face that they'd expect this to be normally distributed, so finding that it isn't doesn't seem noteworthy to me.

Nevermind the fact that the moment you start talking about Emmy nominees, your entire sample group is outliers. What percentage of SAG cardholders is ever nominated?

DD7 said to us at dinner last month, "Did you know that alamost everyone in the world has more than the average number of legs?" I thought about it for a minute, then agreed that she was right. That article has less insight than she did.

I think it's best to review the actual article (which actually is quite heavy on the stats indeed) before we start taking potshots at the simplistic NPR coverage. I'm distracted at the moment, but I'm not actually grasping the original article that well myself; however, it's definitely occurred to me to wonder why we assume that the bell curve is a constant.

It's very frustrating to see papers like this getting published. Part of the problem, IMO, is that the reviewers are as clueless as the authors.

This paper on "values affirmation" as a way of raising the GPAs of certain students is risible, yet got published in Science!

Because the Central Limit Theoren says that for *any* distribution of an underlying variable, for a large enough value of N, a normal distribution will be observed.

I won't claim to have read the paper exactly, but I did glance through it before I took the potshot :-)

Once you've read the article, the real potshots will begin.

I'll give you a hint: AVN.

I think my favorite potshot so far is the indirect one by the seven-year-old who observed that most people have more than the average number of legs.