Hacker News Comments on
The End of Average: Unlocking Our Potential by Embracing What Makes Us Different
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Jul 02, 2022
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giardini on
How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives
FWIW the face of the statue of the "the typical woman 'Norma'" at https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...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...
⬐ leocEven Rose's article (I haven't read his book yet so I can't really say about that) tiptoes around what was going on here. It wasn't just a naive application of statistics. Rose gets through the Norma story without mentioning eugenics once, but the whole episode is so obviously part of America's pre-WWII eugenics swoon. Beyond specific beliefs about politics, race or genetics, but linked to them, there was a whole Zeitgeist, the collectivist spirit of the age that gave us Busby Berkeley musical numbers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysvQ5MaUbd8 and the IBM company songbook https://www.networkworld.com/article/2333702/a-history-of-si... . This was a time when it was acceptable, indeed it was progressive, to be violently hostile to difference or defectiveness: see for example War Against the Weak https://waragainsttheweak.com/ and, maybe most especially, The Black Stork https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-black-stork-9780... . And of course it's no coincidence that the pioneers of statistics tended to be particular fans of eugenics themselves.(I am not an expert on anything.)