Than Average

I'd love for this to have rooms. Your answers could still count toward the global stats, but you would compare only with the group where it was shared.

I'd like to try these questions out in my friend circles (anonymously). Although obviously the results would have to be delivered afterward, since initially there's no baseline.

Some of those questions should also have a “I don’t have a slightest clue” option.

On top of that I think there might be selection bias going on.

There is a pattern. It looks that cerebral introverts (or well: nerds) are more likely to answer these questions.

Some people have a strong desire to not be average, even if it means being far below average.

I mean your obviously right but I still think most of the massive deviations would still be there (like the lying one)

There's no "I'm about average" option, so the results will tend to deviate from average more than they ought to.

This website has been making the rounds on social media for a few days - it's not just a HN sample.

I agree it is still a heavily biased sample though.

Also things like “better partner” are so conditional on who you partner with that a simple general better vs. worse decision seems impossible to answer in a meaningful way.

The problem with having such options in surveys is that everyone then picks it, even though it is statistically unlikely. So better to force them to make a decision instead.

This. I closed out of the quiz when I saw that I couldn't answer "close to average, and without enough certainty or precision to guess above or below".

I have the same issue with most of the popular personality tests. Many of my responses are either extremely neutral or could wildly swing depending on the week, month, year, etc.

For a continuously measured variable like height or attractiveness or curiosity measured at arbitrary precision, your probability of being average is 0.

If you force someone, you truly measure them.

Think of it as a bet. There's no harm in picking either above or below average when you're uncertain into which bin you'll fall, because those cases will even out in the end anyway. Sometimes you'll chose "below average" and actually be 0.1 standard deviations above average. Others will be the other way around, but for your return on investment those cases are not the ones that matter.

In fact, if there was a third "within +-0.3 standard deviations of average" you would probably be unwise to pick it, simply because "below average" has a greater expected value due to covering more of the range of possibilities, even when it's only true 50 % of the time.

Besides, being forced to really try to sense which way one leans is informative!

Ah, this feels interesting. I would have said I’m a below average dancer, but above average person at dancing. The difference being whether I compare to people who I observe dancing, or consider everyone. Differently for sex, I assume that this is possibly bimodal (none versus some), so this could provide a measure of the actual skew in the underlying distribution (difference between mean and median) and not only the perception of bias.

Not necessarily. It's the average of people playing the game, not reporting on some survey.

I saw better than average at maths around 68%... and that might be true for the kind of people who play this game. Dancing and sex might be the same story (didn't see those questions).

> So people are insecure about dancing and sex. This all tracks.

I reckon this is due to only watching apex males perform those acts. As opposed to maths where you probably remember your classmates struggling and were actually tested for your ability.

... thus highlighting that sometimes you really need the median instead of the mean to describe something

Yes. But isn’t this point obvious?

There is no mathematical way to determine the true average of anything unless if there is some true measure that exists outside of perception.

So regardless of the sample size, you will never arrive at any true measure, unless if that measure is of the perception of self, on average.

Which is what this experiment is doing, as you’ve stated.

There's probably a bias towards sightly higher than average IQ, because extremely low IQ usually means intellectual disability, and because IQ correlates with the ability to apply effort (at least at lower IQs). I also suspect but have no evidence that low IQ users tend to stay within walled gardens like Facebook more.

I think a lot of HN would be surprised at what an IQ of 100 looks like.

And the rest show a humorous bias, like "75% say they are less conservative than average".

Or just random. I noticed that in the handful of questions I checked, I often thought: I'm about average (e.g. in hours of sleep), but I had to pick. That might bias towards 50%.

> your own music taste determines what you think constitutes good music taste

No, your own music taste determines what you think is good music. Taste is not about holding your own opinion higher than others', it's just about what you like or not.

I still find it weird that it's a 50/50 split though. Maybe a lot of people aren't thinking so much about whose taste is better, but whose is more refined? Like how people who aren't into wine might not take their own lived experience as seriously as the words of an experienced sommelier?

I could imagine somebody who is pretty self aware could judge their taste in music to be worse than average, if they really only ever buy music from artists that they are later embarrassed by.

But in general, I think this would skew towards people having the preference for their preference.

Theoretically it could also reflect the society. If 80% of people aren’t religious at all, then at most 20% are more religious than average.

> Not sure if it's an artifact of the kind of people who have taken the survey so far, a statement about how people want to be perceived in our culture, or a bit of both.

It could also be that the (loose, intuitively approximated) mode on some level of granularity (the individual category perceived as most commonly seen) rather than the median is going to frequently be the intuitive yardstick for “average”, rather than median (mean of a ordinal categorical trait with no unique obvious reduction to an interval-level measure has no coherent definition, so its not really a candidate average.)

Most people think they are better drivers than average.

77% think they are smarter than average.

It says "average" not "median" so it's not necessary for the result to be 50/50 even if everyone was perfectly honest.

You can sort the results by agreement percent to see which questions are most and least skewed. Interestingly one of the most precisely balanced is "50% of participants think they are better looking than average."

> Most answers were in the 40 to 60 percent range, which is about where it should be mathematically of course.

Not necessarily. For instance there's:

> 77% of participants think they give less to homeless people than average.

Say most people give $0 to homeless people, but 30% of people give some. In that case 77% giving less than average may be correct.

On subjective qualitative questions, the average should probably be above 50% because everybody has different scales and are probably following their own scale better than average. eg. If you believe good driving means following traffic laws, you probably follow traffic laws better than average. If you believe good driving means low lap time on a race track, you might have a better lap time than average.

New idea: this same questionnaire, but all questions ending in "average HN user".

On Safari/iOS I can’t read the questions because the crowd is over a few words on each one

The 'confidence' question was hard to answer. In some areas I am confident, in others not so much. I think most people are like that. There were a few other questions that I found hard to answer as yes or no. Or maybe I am misunderstanding confidence or don't want to see myself as lacking confidence.

The Friendship paradox has nothing to do with what people think: it's an observed fact and related to the way that node degree in social graphs work (or random graphs in general).

I think it can apply to skills.

For example, if you go to a gym, you are probably among the weakest in the room. Simply because the strongest are more likely to be those who go to the gym the most and therefore, the ones you are most likely to encounter.

If you hit the dance floor, the same happens, and as expected, most people think they are below average dancers. In fact, the worst dancers may not dance at all, so you can't compare yourself to them.

Should be pretty easy for the site owner to analyze that.

The entire exercise is an inversion. It's really asking you about confidence and insecurities

you're not averaging actual numbers, its just "X than the average person"

You don't need to average opinions. Just imagine you pick a person at random from your peer group and ask yourself how likely it is that you have better taste in music than that person.

I had this exact problem.

> Are your feet better looking than average?

Ok, I understand what they mean but I have no opinion on that, just generally not finding feet attractive and I can honestly say I have never considered the question before. I consider it for a few moments and realize I have no values that would allow me to formulate an opinion on it. So then I fall back to, would an average foot lover find my feet more or less attractive than average? I still have no idea. So then I fall back to a meta strategy, ok if I am going to answer questions stating my opinion when I have no opinion, what should I do? Alternate answers? Always answer that I am better? Always answer that I am worse? I understand that they are interested in what the distribution is going to be after people answer the questions so someone hedging is not giving helpful information.

I decided that my strategy was to leave the website. I was curious if anyone else found being presented with a binary choice for an estimate at a continuous random variable off putting. I would have been much more willing to give a confidence interval around some abstract mean.

43% of the people here thought the same, that negative criticism should not be shared here.

There is always room for feedback, but please make it constructive.

"I don't think that" just because someone has an opinion that varies with that of the author, that they necessarily should try to outdo them.

While I do disagree with the chosen wording (using 'a cool new feature would be to...' sounds a bit more friendly, if you will) I don't think that anything is said in bad faith. This is a passion project for the creator and he most likely wants to improve it. He should still follow his vision of what he wants this website to be, but that doesn't take away anything from the suggestive comments posted here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

That is a very common but misguided attitude towards criticism. It is fairly easy to determine you dislike something without necessarily knowing how it could be improved. Knowing how much people dislike something is useful information in regards to that thing. Maybe the author doesn't care, kudos to them in that case. There is nothing wrong with creating something which strongly divides people into love/hate categories. In any case, it is presented here for an audience and the audience can choose to respond as they see fit, they do not need to acquiesce to something distasteful to them.

From a cusiosity perspective, the aversion some people (including me) seem to have towards it makes me more curious if it suffers a strong selection bias. I tried a couple of questions but couldn't actually answer a single one. I was simply incapable of formulating an opinion on the question posed. I was even incapable of choosing one of the options simple to progress. That was what I found most amusing in it: my inability to answer a seemingly easy question.

Was thinking the whole thing stinks of selection bias but this one is the epitome hahaha

Absolutely, across the board, but I kind of enjoyed the meta-game of "guess how people selection-biased to be like you will answer".

The flaw in this survey is that they do not specify what type of average they are referring to.

The average person has less than 2 hands :)

But it does define.

"Imagine you are in a room with 100 strangers, Imagine they're similar to your peers and neighbours."

It asks you to compare yourself to your peers, not to the global population, so the results should still be close to 50%, even if it does say "average" and not "median".

There must be a term for this, but I imagine no one is average across all attributes. Curse of dimensionality maybe?

Also 81% have less sex than average...as well as upper 70% have less friends than average.

That's certainly an interesting point. The questions have ~9K responses at this time; I wonder how many of those can be attributed to an hour of being posted on HN.

> 61% of participants also think they are better at maths than average.

Yeah, given my discussions about math with people in non-technical fields, I think this answer is very skewed.

I wouldn't say "progressive" is a word I'd associate with the HN demographic, based on some of what I've seen here. There's a definite libertarian skew, but that seems to fall along both sides of the left/right political spectrum.

As to whether the typical HN user would answer "yes" if asked if they are more progressive than average, however, I do also suspect they would answer "yes."

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That guideline is not there because we don't know how annoying HN comments can be, but because we do know. Reacting by adding snark or denunciation to the threads just makes things even worse.

The only response that really helps, in reaction to bad or unsubstantive or obvious comments, is to post good, substantive, non-obvious ones.

Sometimes when I go to a friend's house, they have dishes in their sink that have obviously been there for a number of days. Conversely, I have had roommates who will cook a complex meal, dirtying many dishes in the process, but still have very little cleanup after the meal because they clean efficiently as they go (a practice I try to emulate to varying success). I would say the former group is not very good at washing up their dishes, while the latter is (from my own observations, at least) better than average.

edit: this is also one of the easier questions to actually have a good sense of where you stand. I don't know how often most of my peers cry, for instance, but I do know how often I visit someone's house and they have dirty dishes lying around, or they leave dishes from a dinner party or get-together in the sink for the next morning, etc.

Summers during college, I worked as staff at a summer camp, where part of the "camp experience" was that the kids got to (had to) help wash the dishes are meals. This was usually done by a rota, so a different subset (4 to 5) of the campers (mostly 6-12th grade, but there were adult camps too) helped after each meal, and the staff took turns supervising this.

As such, over the course of a few summers, I have watched 100s (18 meals/week, 10 weeks/ yr, 3 years) of discrete groups of people of varying ages "wash" dishes and can confirm that there is a wide range of dishwashing skills across the following criteria:

- cleanliness (what % of dishes had to be sent back for rewashing because they were too dirty for the sterilizer)

- speed (fast groups would be done in 20-25 minutes. Slow ones could take an hour+, mostly because they would spend time complaining or arguing rather than actually washing anything)

- how much of a mess was made (sink water splashed on the floor, mostly) during the cleaning progress

And our dishes were unbreakable, but if they hadn't been, I'm sure "breakage" would have been a metric too.

I've seen way too many plates that have been "washed" yet have grime solidified to them, or worse, still damp on them.

Some people really can be worse at washing dishes. But I'm not sure how I'd define "good" or "average".

> Based solely on your own instinct, perceptions, and self-reflection, answer the following questions

My gut immediate instinct says yes, for me.

It's hard to articulate this stuff. As humans, we're pattern matching machines. Try not to think too hard about it.

Have you ever lived with other people? Some of my housemates of uni days would leave large chunks of semi-masticated food on all the items of cutlery. Others would wash greasy frying pans before wine glasses.

I think the problem with this question is, you either think you're better at washing dishes, like me, or you don't care, like my housemates (and possibly you). Who thinks they are worse at it?

Wow you got angry. This is not a tone people expect on this forum.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html