Frontpage Feed
Community Feed
The Idea Market Feed
The 'Verse Feed
If You Only Had a Brain
Submitted by Don Lloyd on Sat, 2007-07-21 12:40.
Tiny Brain No Problem for French Tax Official
Something that many people secretly believed has been confirmed: You don't actually need a brain to work in a tax office. A French civil servant has been found to have a huge cavity filled with fluid in his head -- yet lives a completely normal life.
Trackback URL for this post:
http://distributedrepublic.net/trackback/9788
»
Not just the tax office
Apparently you don't need a brain to be a French citizen either. If this group is a representative selection of the French populous then no wonder they never attempted to land on the moon. About 56% of the audience didn't know what orbits the earth. I snark because often I have to listen to foreigners talk about how stupid Americans are. They often point to Jay Leno style "man on the street interviews" for their assessment. I never considered the possibility that they formed their opinions because they were not educated enough to be aware of self selection or cutting room floor bias. Now whenever I get one of these jerks I'm just going to reply, "You do know it's a fact that fifty percent of the citizens of your countries citizens are of below average intelligence?" I hope for Frances sake that audience was not representative.
Americans are not as ignorant as...
More of us are literate compared to them:
More of us are literate than before:
Hmm... can it really have changed so much? Well, take it with a grain of salt, then.
The public might also want
The public might also want to press the wrong answer to make fun of the guy.
Brian - you mean "below the
Brian - you mean "below the median intelligence?" right? Because the average tells us nothing about the distribution. Sorry to be the stats-nazi.
:)
"A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police." - Mises
True but all standard
True but all standard measures of intelligence are calibrated to produce symmetrical distributions anyway.
Actually most test are calibrated to produce symmetrical distributions, which is stupid since many of them are applied to selected sample who are already supposed to live in a tail.
The Bell Curve
Yes I was assuming a normal distribution where mean = median = mode. Of course, to be precisely accurate I should have said "at or below average intelligence" but it sort of loses it's when sting said that way.
BTW, I first heard the phrase as "Did you know that half of girls are of below average intelligence". Of course that means they are as smart as boys but it certainly gets them irked, which is part of the beauty of the statement.
Reminds me of the following.
Reminds me of the following. Which has on average most heterosexual partners in his life, a woman or a man?
Post new comment