Most are Average
From "Framing The GOP", by Parker Blackman (which I read at TomPaine.com), this stunning tautology:
Most Americans are moderate in their views; extremism on either side of the political spectrum makes them uncomfortable.
I've known for some time that most people don't have any sort of feeling for statistical concepts, and few of them seem to have any intuition about what an "average" is. This is another brilliant example of that truth, and an excellent starting point for discussing the "average", which I don't really feel up to starting yet; but here are a few notes.
Years ago, I had a student in an introductory physics lab, who was concerned that his data were not very good because, in his words: "some of the values were above the average and some were below the average". How could it be otherwise?
Since then I've claimed that one of the funniest thing about Garrison Keillor's witticism that, in the fictitous Lake Wobegon, "all of the children are above average", is that so many people overlook the irony in their rush to agree that it would be a very desirable state of affairs.
Although we take the author's rhetorical point, how could "most Americans" not be "moderate in their views", since the only sensible meaning for "moderate" would be in reference to viewpoints help by "most Americans"?
Until next time, interested readers are asked to work on their essays addressing the topic "The Normal Distribution and its Relation to Normal Things".
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science, Raised Eyebrows Dept.