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Comment by ohduran | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't you need the worse pilot you can get? Average doesn't account for the fact that 50% of the sample are WORSE.

Robert Sheckley has a short story called The Minimum Man, which is about precisely this. An unlucky, clumsy, error-prone schlub who gets hired by basically-NASA for testing purposes.

Turns out, when he's placed in a life-or-death situation, he finds some focus and skill, and is no longer the minimum man. So they have some ways to counter that tendency....

> So they have some ways to counter that tendency....

Alcohol?

That correlates with something interesting I learnt about leadership a while back - evidence shows that it's very hard to predict ahead of time whether someone will be a good leader from one context to another, with predicted good leaders often underperforming, and vice versa (might be a little out of date now).

Wartime general vs. peacetime general is the classic example.

In times of crisis, we rarely rise to the occasion, but rather sink to the level of our training.

I think a better term should be "minimally proficient pilot". One that passes all the requirements, but not by very much. That's the lowest common denominator you should be targeting for certification.

But that's median not average...

I don’t know what you think ‘average’ means. Median is an average.

Most commonly it is used for the mean though...

Less than you might think. Mean is easier to calculate and tends to be close enough, but when there are are significant outliers people tend to revert to the median.

Life expectancy for example is calculated via median. Median income is generally used over average etc.

Mean wouldn’t make any sense in this context. Does a mean pilot even exist? Median pilots exist by definition.

If you can order pilots by some quantifiable measure, you can also take the mean of that and select pilots that are exactly the mean or closests to the mean.

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

Given set: 1 2 2 2 2 2 4 10

What's the average? 3.125

What's the median? 2

Mean is 3.125, median is 2, and mode is 2. All of those are averages.

Imagine the day you're hired to be a test pilot, and _officially_ graduate as the worst pilot there is!

imagine being the second to worst pilot, and not being hired at all.

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