The end of Average
The age of average
1)The invention of the average
i)The mathematics of society
Quetelet ( born 1796 ) establish a social science by borrowing astronomy’s method of averages and applying it to people. It revolutionized the way society thought of the individual.
He analyzed a data set published in an Edinburgh medical journal . He thought : If you averaged 1000 different soldiers , it would be a very close approximation of the one true soldier.
ii) the average man
He computed the average of every human attribute he could get data on. In doing so , he also invented the Quetelet Index - today known as the BMI - to identify the average health.
Governments adopted his social physics as a basis for understanding their citizens and crafting social policy.
His invention of the average man marked the beginning of the age of average. It represented the moment when the average became normal the individual became error , and stereotypes were validated with imprints of science.
iii) the eminent and the imbecile
Francis Galton was a mathematician whose family made a fortune in banking and gun manufacturing. The eminent are those who were far above average while the imbecile were far below average.
He carved mankind up into fourteen distinct classes from Imbecile to the “Mediocre” to “Eminent”. The human worth could be measured by how far a person was from average.
Two assumptions unconsciously shared by almost every member of society 1) Quetelet’s idea of average man and 2)Galton’s idea of rank Both relied on a comparison of the individual to group average.
2) How our world became standardized
In the 1880s , America was transitioning from an agrarian economy to an industrial one Frederick Winslow Taylor , chief engineer at Enterprise Hydraulic Works , contemplated the problems of the new era of factory production. There were runaway inflation , plunging wages and frequent financial panics. Turnover was high.
He thought that the way factories organized his workers was clumsy , inept and unscientific. He believed that he could systematically eliminate inefficiency from business by adopting the core precept of averagarianism , the idea that individuality did not matter. “In the past the man was first” “ in the future i) the system must be first.
Initially , companies hired the most talented employees and reorganised a company’s processes according to what they believed would help them be most productive.
He thought businesses should hire the most talented employees and reorganised a company’s processes according to what they believed would help them be the most productive.
He thought businesses should hire Average man who fit the system.
He used his teacher’s method of standardizing homework to standardize any industrial process. He optimized a task’s speed , measured the average completion time then standardized the entire industrial process with no deviation.
There was always “one best way” to accomplish any given task.
ii) the birth of the manager
Someone who creates the standards that governed a business. All planning , control and decision making from the workers should be handed over to a new class of “planners” who would be responsible for overseeing the workers and determining the one best way to standardize an organisation’s process.
Business owners restructured their enterprises by creating departments and sub departments , each headed by a Taylorist manager , making the organisational chart.
Thinking and planning were cleanly separated from making and doing.
(iii) factories of education
The educational Taylorist declared that the new mission of education should be to prepare mass numbers of students to work in the new Talorized economy.
To organise and teach children to become workers who could perform industrial tasks in a “perfect way” , he remade the entire educational system.
Grouped student by age , rotated them through different classes , lasting a standardized period of time and have school bells emulate factory bells - to mentally prepare children
The curriculum planner created fixed , inviolable curriculum that dictated everything.
(iv) the gifted and the useless
Edward Thorndlike believed that instead of Taylorist goal of education which was to provide every student with the same average education , schools should sort young people according to their ability so that educational resources could be allocated accordingly .
To help establish his desired system of student ranking , he created standardised test. He supported the use of grades as a convenient metric for ranking student’s overall talent.
(v) A world of type and rank
By forcing college applicants and job seekers to take standardized tests, nepotism and cronyism were reduced and students from less privileged backgrounds attained unprecedented access to opportunities to a better life.
Averagarism : society compels each of us to conform to certain narrow expectations in order to succeed.
“Be like everyone else , only better”
We are told there is one right way to get things done , and if we pursue an alternate course , we are often told that we are misguided , naive , or just plain wrong.
Excellence , too often , is not prioritized over conforming to the system.
3) Overthrowing the average.
i) the ergodic bait and switch
Ergodic theory : use information about a gap to draw conclusions about individual members of the group.
On two condition : (frozen clones)
1) every member is identical (clones)
2) every member remains the same in the future (frozen)
ii) the science of the individual
If you could use averages to evaluate , model and select individuals , what could you use ?
Averagarianism offered an efficient way to sift through large numbers of people.
1) It worked better than anything else that was available.
2) Concise statements that seem true because they appear to be based on forthright maths.
E.g. “she is smarter than average,” or “he was ranked second in his graduating class,” or “she is an introvert”
Human qualities cannot be reduced to a single score.
Statistics : a math of static values.
To accurately understand individuals , one needs dynamic systems - the math of changing , non linear dynamic values ( CDS “ complex dynamic system”
(iii) Analyze , then aggregate.
The science of the individual instructs scientist to analyze , then aggregate.
First , look for patterns within each individual. Then , look for ways to combine these individual patterns into collective insight.
There is on difficulty presented by individual first approach : it requires a great deal of data , far more data than averagarian approaches.
4) Talent is always jagged
Ranking individuals on a handful of metrics is a common practice for recruitment . ( hiring process) It is prevalent method of evaluating existing employees. ( during performance evaluation)
They are easy and intuitive to use and they carry the imprint of objectiveness and mathematical certitude.
In a harvard business review article , research suggest that a single score rating might not capture the true performance of an employee / the person rating that performance.
Google , Deloitte and Microsoft abandoned their rankings which rank talent on a single scale and make assumptions about their potential.
(i) the jaggedness principle
We cannot apply one dimensional thinking to understand something that is complex.
A quality is jagged if it meets two criteria
1) It has multiple dimensions.
2) These dimensions must be weakly related to one another
(ii) the weakest link .
Weak correlations:
1 is a perfect correlation ( eg. height in cm / inches)
0 is no correlation (e.g. your height vs temperature on Saturn)
0.8+ is strong , 0.4 is weak.
The correlations between each of the dimensions of mental ability are not particularly strong. E.g. short term memory vs arithmetic.
If you sub divide intelligence even further and compare , short term memory for words to short term memory for images , these “ micro dimensions” also exhibit weak correlations
(iii) Overcoming talent blindness
Todd Carlisle , Google HR analyst , couldn’t find a single variable that mattered for most jobs at Google.
Managers have to focus on which factors you emphasize as most important in a hiring packet.
IGN changed its hiring strategy. Instead of using an identical one dimensional criteria like grades and standardized score like Google or Microsoft , which will lead to a small subset that’s more likely to sign with a big fish , they changed the way they thought about talent.
They had a 6 week Code Foo camp that completely ignored educational background and experience. They answered for questions which tests their abilities
The real difficulty is not finding new ways to distinguish talent - it is getting rid of the one dimensional blindness that prevented us from seeing it all along.
(iv) Tapping into your full potential
Recognising our own jaggedness is the first step to understanding our full potential and refusing to be caged in by arbitrary , average based pronouncements of who we are expected to be.
E.g. someone with poor working memory could swap to a visual thinking problem solving method.
When we become aware of our jaggedness , we are less likely to fall prey to one dimensional views of talent that limit what we are capable of.
5) Traits are a myth
Essentialist thinking is both a consequence and a cause of typing : if we know someone’s personality traits , we believe we can classify them as a particular type. In turn , we form conclusions about their personality and behavior
When it comes to predicting the behavior of individuals , traits actually do a poor job. Our personality and behavior are not explained by a collection of enduring traits.
The context principle
Trait based personality tests assume that we can be either extroverts or introverts… but not both.
However e.g. A girl might be extroverted in the cafeteria , but not introverted on the playground.
