How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives

Another very powerful demographic chart that I lost (in case someone knows where it is) is a 3 dimensional chart. Y axis is children per women, X axis is infant mortality, and then there is a slider to look at the evolution through time. All countries are plotted as points.

The reason it is powerful is because by moving the slider you can see the evolution through time. For most now developed countries, infant mortality and children per women both reduced simultaneously as the progress of medicine and the evolution of society have been very gradual. But african countries are following a different path, where the infant mortality collapsed but is not followed by a reduction of children per woman (only a few countries have started to take that turn). That is basically all you need to know to explain the major demographic shift we are about to observe in Africa.

Looks right to me! Although interestingly it’s unclear which book / Book you’re referring to, as the expression comes from Exodus 2:22:

“And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.”

The mean only has meaning for normal distribution, so it's my least favorite summary, because it assumes the most. Imho the normal dist is assumed way too often.

Look at the male/female height graphs on https://www.usablestats.com/lessons/normal for example (among the first examples that google came up with).

The thing that stands out is the difference between the bell curves - the area under the male height curve that is not under the female one. (Indeed, on this page, the way they drew their histogram version of the curve they explicitly drew attention to this area)

But this area isn’t representative of a meaningful population.

It’s just the sum of the excess number of men of a given height over and above the number of women of the same height.

Crucially, the vast majority of men accounted for within that population are still shorter than some women.

Unless you are, according to these numbers, over 77” tall - ie, over 6’5” - then there exist women who are taller than you.

Admittedly the population of people taller than you certainly skews heavily male - but for any randomly selected group of men, in most cases it is possible to find a group of just as many women who are all taller.

I personally find that the overlapping bell curve illustration obscures that understanding, making it emphasize more that a small number of below-average men are still taller than some women, and completely hiding the tail of outlier men on the left who are shorter than the vast majority of women…

Stacked histograms are a better way to visualize this kind of faceted distribution - but even that has issues.

Teachers are generally pretty progressive (both in the political and innovation senses), but the legislation (like Common Core), state & district educational standards, and school boards move more slowly. And in the US, the primary schools are largely funded and overseen by local parents (municipal and state), so the school priorities and cultures partially reflect local priorities.

There's often debate between what individual teachers want to teach (a product of their individual preferences and backgrounds and values) vs what the administration forces them to teach (as a reflection of the political and business realities of their particular school). There's often a personality difference between the two classes too (educators vs admin types), with the former often being (at a stereotype) starry-eyed idealists and the latter being grounded management types with an eye on the numbers of finance and politics; on top of that, there is also often a labor vs mgmt (not quite "owners") divide, with individual teachers being pretty much powerless to teachers' unions being really strong in some districts. Long story short, teachers can't unilaterally change the curricula they teach.

The power struggles affect everything from math (new math, math wars, whether to test it, etc.) to social studies (CRT, Native studies, bilingualism, religious studies) to science (evolution, climate) to business needs (cursive vs typing, algorithms or letterheads), etc.

Far from being a settled matter, our educational system is heavily political and its lack of progress is probably reflective of our divisiveness as a country, where two broad sides keep playing tug-of-war and veering towards the extremes, making tiny gains and losses back and forth.

The kids end up caught in the crossfire. The US, for all the money we pour into education, ends up rather poorly educating its children vs other developed nations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

resembles Dana Scully of The X-Files.

I also enjoyed Todd Rose's book, which examines the history of (mis-)interpretations and (mis-)uses of the "average":

The End of Average

https://www.amazon.com/End-Average-Unlocking-Potential-Embra...

I read ~10 two star reviews, ~10 four star reviews, much more depending on price. One stars tend to be full of stuff like "product hasn't arrived", "garboage", user errors. Five stars are plagued by spam and paid reviews, and also a lack of details. Three stars seem to be split between very picky buyers (esp. hate the "I paid $3.50 for this and it's not the omega particle!") and people afraid to leave lower ratings for reasons.

Your first idea requires new, expensive infrastructure that will need maintenance due to mechanical parts. Given charging points are regularly broken at the moment, I don’t have high hopes. But even if we overcame that: it’s impractical in almost every major city in the World, because you’d have to drastically alter existing spaces, such as filling stations.

This might work in your context, and many others. It might even work for the “average” use case. But for 75% of the developed World (where the EV market is the fastest growing), I’m not convinced.

And the electric cargo bike argument - or bikes in general - work great for the “average” journey, but not many people actually take that journey.

My most frequent drive is 200+ miles in normally wet or cold weather. My next most frequent is 15+ miles in baking hot Summer sunshine in a heavily congested city where I need aircon. Neither would be pleasant on a bike - electric or not.

And I think that’s the point of this discussion: engineering for averages is a terrible idea, and most EVs don’t work for most journey profiles for most of the World’s drivers today, compared to ICE

One problem was that they had chosen one model of car to simplify battery inventory, but the car was not a good fit for their initial markets.

https://www.nio.com/blog/current-state-ev-battery-swapping

They do when ICEs are getting banned.

Driving from San Diego to Sacramento is about 800km; in good weather and light traffic you could cover that in 7 or 8 hours. Get up early, drive that first leg, stop for lunch, then keep going (e.g. towards Portland or Seattle).

Of course, an American would usually stop for gas before hitting empty because we're used to the idea of "No food or fuel next 2 hours".

Yes, that is not an average situation, but there's a lot of peace of mind not having to think about it at all. By the time I get down to 250 miles in my ICE, I can fill up in 5 minutes, but still have a very comfortable margin for anything that may happen.

And, worst case, if I run out of gas (never happened in my lifetime)? I can get a gallon of fuel and drive away. How does that work with an EV?

> Openness directed towards feelings and aesthetics rather than ideas. Women generally also have a stronger interest in people rather than things, relative to men (also interpreted as empathizing vs. systemizing).

> These two differences in part explain why women relatively prefer jobs in social or artistic areas. More men may like coding because it requires systemizing and even within SWEs, comparatively more women work on front end, which deals with both people and aesthetics.

https://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-di...