They won't listen. Do you know why? Because they have certain fixed notions about the past. Any change would be blasphemy in their eyes, even if it were the truth. They don't want the truth; they want their traditions.
Isaac Asimov, Pebble in the Sky
January 31, 2023
Much of the trouble can be traced to the concept of normal/average. A case of a math sci tech, inappropriately applied because it is supported and supports social tech.
Let’s kill this because at the math level it is totally like saying 1+1=3.
In statistics, a normal distribution, or bell curve, relies on Gauss’ theorem which applies *only* to random variables, like a set of identical, unbiased dice or coins. It tells you that if you toss such coins a very large number of times, the distribution will be half heads and half tails. It is very very important that the heads are independent of the tails and that the coins are independent of each other.
It works for people if you are measuring, say, height or age. It does not work for ergonomics, behavior, or intelligence, as these comprise multiple dimensions that are weakly related to one another. (The weakly is important because if they were very strongly correlated we can reduce the system to just one dimension.) Rose calls this jaggedness but it’s important to realize that this is not something special. Almost every property in nature that we measure is not a Gaussian distribution.
The dice and coins in the normal distribution are abstractions. They are very special in that we do not care about what happened between the toss and the final outcome. (If we did, say by taking into account the motion of the air or variations in the tossing, they would not satisfy Gauss’ theorem anymore.)
An end state, even the unusual one of equilibrium, can be approached through a variety of paths. If you drop a marble into a bowl it can take many different paths to it. So can you, when you go to the store, to the top of a mountain, or to the next stage of your life. A normal distribution is not predictive of anything in such systems.
This is super basic, you fail your physics exam if you flub this. As a practicing physicist, the onus is on you to prove you can use a normal distribution because it hardly ever applies.
We don’t even have to get any further on what makes humans special, it is enough that we are not Gaussian dice. (Real-life dice are not Gaussian dice either.) So how come we use such terrible math to organize ourselves and build our self-concept around them?
If you want to do it right
As Rose points out, in general systems theory the "many ways to skin a cat" is the concept of equifinality. A fancy word that describes the most common situation.
There is also multifinality: any one component may function differently depending on the organization of the system in which it operates. Obviously relevant for people.
And path-dependence and memory. But all that is small print compared to the basic mistake in Step 1.
Rose does a great job of telling the stories of the main characters that created this situation. It is a story everyone should know.
There is Quetelet, the French mathematician who came up with the concept of the “average man" (l'homme moyen) characterized by the mean values of measured variables that follow a normal distribution. This wasn’t a simple misapplication of math. [Adolphe Quetelet also had a significant influence on Florence Nightingale who shared with him a religious view of statistics which saw understanding statistics as revealing the work of God in addition to statistics being a force of good administration.]
Everything found dissimilar, not only as regarded proportion or form, but as exceeding the observed limits, would constitute a Monstrosity. […] Everything differing from the Average Man’s proportions and condition, would constitute deformity and disease.
The eugenicist Galton jacked it up by adding the insane assumption justified by the social rank system of his time. He put the lower ranks at the low end of the Gaussian distribution (and called them the "imbeciles") and the upper ranks at the top (the “eminents”).
He declared that people if you score highly on one item, you must be an eminent, and eminents score highly in everything, from morality and health to sports and beauty.
As statistics have shown, the best qualities are largely correlated. […] The youths who became judges, bishops, statesman, and leaders of progress in England could have furnished formidable athletic teams in their times.
It sounds ridiculous but it has consequences: it effectively reduces the weakly correlated variables to one, rank, which makes the normal distribution work again. At least better than before. Our assessment systems still work this way.
This might not have happened if it wasn’t for the industrial revolution and Taylor who invented the assembly line. He made the concept “useful” by reducing people to parts of a machine.
Taylorism: scientific management remains the most dominant philosophy of business organization in every industrialized country.
Rose also covers the most important concept of Context but we will discuss this elsewhere [marshmallow, context].
The new social technologies
The fingerprint of heaven and hell, literally interpreted, as WEIRD tracks down, is all over this. Would that have been enough? We will never know because it also fit very well the social technologies of rank and societal stratification of that time.
We tend to believe that, deep down in the bedrock of a person’s soul, someone is essentially wired to be friendly or unfriendly, lazy or industrious, introverted or extroverted, and that these defining characteristics will shine through no matter what the circumstances or task. This belief is known as essentialist thinking.
Worse than useless because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.
It’s unacceptable that in an age when we can map the human genome and tweak genetic coding to improve our health, we haven’t been able to accurately map human potential.
Whenever you read about some new neuroscience discovery accompanied by a blob-splotched cross section of a brain—here are the regions that light up when you feel love; here are the regions that light up when you feel fear—it’s a near certainty that you are looking at a map of an Average Brain.
This conviction stems from the third mental barrier of averagarianism: normative thinking. The key assumption of normative thinking is that the right pathway is the one followed by the average person, or at least the average member of a particular group we hope to emulate, such as successful graduates or professionals.