Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmmayer1 | Hacker News Reader

Important to realize that the average taker of this survey is likely nowhere close to the average person on quite a few of these qualities, or even the average internet user. It's going to skew more tech savvy / progressive / intelligent / etc -- the Hacker News bump alone renders the "insights" you might glean from the results almost meaningless.

For example, that 76% of takers think they are more privileged than average is probably an underestimate, not an overestimate as you would first believe...

View 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'd assume the majority of people think they're bad at math based on passing observation.

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

I don’t know a term for it, but here's a relevant blog post:

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-norma...

> For a multivariate normal distribution in high dimensions, nearly all the probability mass is concentrated in a thin shell some distance away from the origin.

“Average pilot fallacy”? https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...

When designing cockpits using the average dimensions of pilots the US Air Force found exactly 0 pilots who were average in all 10 dimensions. Even just using 3 dimensions only 3.5% were considered “average”. Take the average dimensions of a human hand and draw that hand. Almost nobody has the dimensions of that hand.

That’s so cool: just occurred to me it’s like the inverse of crowdsourcing. No one guesses the right weight of the cow, but the average of all guesses is almost exactly the right weight.

Well, here you never know the weight of the cow, per se. If the weight-of-cow question were asked, it would "If you were asked to guess the weight of some cow, do you believe you would overestimate it?" And then you find out, that, 63% other people share your self-evaluation, or else do not. There is no info about any actual cow.

On HN, there was recently an article [1] on this topic. You may also be interested in the discussion [2,3].

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22956832

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287

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".

Most of the people who I imagine to be my "peers and neighbors" probably wouldn't visit a site like this or spend as much time on Hacker News as me.

You aren't my peers, guy!

I don't personally consider "HN readers with tech jobs" to be my peers. I'd instead pick my friends, family, coworkers and extended social circle.

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.

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

Fewer friends than average actually kind of makes sense:

> The friendship paradox is the phenomenon first observed by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991 that most people have fewer friends than their friends have, on average. It can be explained as a form of sampling bias in which people with more friends are more likely to be in one's own friend group. Or, said another way, one is less likely to be friends with someone who has very few friends.

> [...]

> In spite of its apparently paradoxical nature, the phenomenon is real, and can be explained as a consequence of the general mathematical properties of social networks. The mathematics behind this are directly related to the arithmetic-geometric mean inequality and the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality.

Strangely, however:

> In contradiction to this, most people believe that they have more friends than their friends have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

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."

Yup. And given that an almost exactly inverse group said they're more conservative than average, that's a hot take on how tech libertarians view themselves if given a binary choice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com