How do we define average?

dakru · 2017-10-20T15:12:10+00:00

Is an average person a 5/10?

A lot of people think this must necessarily be the case because 5 is in the middle but that does not line up with how I see people actually use the 1–10 scale (particularly men, because I don't see women using it often enough to get as good of a sense of how they do/would use it). I think the average is more of a 6 or a 7, at least when rating people of their own age group. I definitely do not see an equal number of ratings below 5 and above 5 given. Maybe if they were forced to rate everyone, including 80 year olds, then the average would fall to closer to 5/10, but even then 5/10 is still not a magic number that the average must necessarily be.

Which isn't actually strange at all, when you think about it. The average IMDB movie rating isn't necessarily 5/10, the average app store rating isn't necessarily 2.5/5, and the average grade in a class isn't necessarily 50%.

TheGreasyPole · 2017-10-20T16:01:07+00:00

I think that it’s important to distinguish between it existing and us being able to access it.

I think that it’s largely unquestionable that something like an SMV/RMV does exist, and could be used to derive an average. Either median or mean. The MV is critical, “Market Value” is I think something that exists in the SMP.

This doesn’t mean that everyone would mark every other person identically. But it does mean there is a value that could in theory be derived.

So, perhaps, you’d pay $1k for that car, and I'd pay $2k, but the market value does still exist.

The next question is.... can we access this “true” SMV/RMV. The answer to which seems to be “Yes, but imperfectly”. We can get a good idea of what it is. A “rate these pictures” thread for example.

Something like that is probably close enough to be useful, without being truly accurate. I’d expect any real SMV/RMV to be within a point or so of a small sample like that.

In this system (1-10) an average person would be 5.5 with a 5 slightly below average and a 6 slightly above.

I’m not going to go into the spread from there... Because then we’re going to start discussing bell curves, and standard deviations, or decile systems.... and that never ends well... because I end up in interminable conversations with drok.

But I think there is a “true” number for everyone, you can use that to average, and we can access that albeit imperfectly.

Littleknownfacts · 2017-10-20T15:38:51+00:00

A completely unremarkable person is 5/10. Then they get +/- depending on independent features.

Merger-Arbitrage · 2017-10-20T15:08:08+00:00

The only "true" way to do it would be to have every man rate every woman (and the reverse) on a scale of 1-10 - or at least everyone relevant in question.

At this point all of the ratings could be summarized with some statistics (median, mode, mean, etc.)

I'd argue that the median rating for a gender would be the "average." Given the limited range of outcomes (1-10 only ; no sky high outliers) you could use a mean, too.

So if the median (or mean) man was rated 4/10... then anyone rated 4/10 is average, while someone 3/10 is below average... and someone 5/10 is above average.

Your example includes an unrealistically small sample size and two rating "buckets" (very high and very low).

whichbladeN · 2017-10-20T15:31:24+00:00

Those rating systems are fiercely subjective and mostly inflated because it's hard to get a scope of the full range of people.

SkookumTree · 2017-10-20T15:53:54+00:00

How the hell is this 1-10 scale defined? Is it by mean and standard deviation? By deciles? Is the distribution held to be normal, or skewed? Is it a power-law distribution?

ffbtaw · 2017-10-20T17:19:47+00:00

Attractiveness is normally distributed, the mode median and mean are all the same. As for the island it depends if you want to say the average of the island or the average of the greater human population distinct from the island.

Where you want to put the mean and how you want to set the standard deviation are arbitrary. Some people use u=5,s=1 others use u=7,s=1.5. There are limits, if you are on a scale of 1-10 you have to truncate at 1 and 10 and if the truncated population is a significant portion of the total population then that is an infeasible model.

pinkgoldrose · 2017-10-20T19:03:25+00:00

She'd be like a six in New York, but she's a seven in Scranton.

Johnny_Lawless_Esq · 2017-10-23T16:29:08+00:00

It's not linear. It's a normal distribution. Roughly seventy percent of people are between 3.5 and 6.5.

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BPremium · 2017-10-20T15:51:47+00:00

local population total, seperate the age group youre discussing (itll be a percentage of the total), adjust for force multipliers and competition, and divide that number by singles.

I just made it up, but it sounds like a decent math problem lol

Edit: or +/- points while the baseline is Gilbert Gottfried 🤣🤣🤣

stats135 · 2017-10-20T16:17:35+00:00

I'm firmly in the camp of defining things by ends not mean and in terms of averages for people, it's the only really way of doing it. How would you define an average profession? You simply can't. But you can boil the means of making a living down to the end goal of the salary. Then you can say something meaningful about the average salary.

Same thing with attactiveness. What is the average attire? Or average haircut? There's no such thing. But you can boil it down to why men become attactiveness in the first place, sex.

Average is not defined by who they are, or what they do. It doesn't matter if you are a doctor or a shit shoveler. If you make the average 50k, then you are average. There is no such thing as an average profession, there is only an average salary for professionals. In the same light, there is no such thing as an average man, only how much sex men have on average.

EliteSpartanRanger · 2017-10-20T17:21:06+00:00

On an island with only 5 men, 3 10's and 2 2's, is the average person a 10, a 6.8, or a 5 still?

N=30 or more to be statistically valid

And then it would mostly normalize

changeIsTheWay · 2017-10-21T01:12:38+00:00

I define average as the cusp of being attractive and unattractive.

Title	How do we define average?
Author	Kerb_Poet
Upvotes	3
Comments	32
Date	October 20, 2017 2:55 PM UTC (8 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/77mlfs/how_do_we_define_average/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/how-do-we-define-average.265230 https://theredarchive.com/post/265230

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