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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Wow, are they really trying to declare a dichotomy between "talented" and "young"?

Only a fraction of young people are "talented". At least 50% of them will be ""below average"", whatever that means.

No, 50% of them will be (at or) below median. The word "average" has multiple meanings, but it's most commonly used to mean "mean", i.e. "arithmetic average". It's perfectly possible for most people to be below the mean (e.g. in a room full of schoolkids and Bill Gates, only one person is above-average wealthy).

But this is not a room of schoolkids with one billionaire. It's a large sample of the general population, with the variable being measured known to be roughly normally distributed.

Normally distributed with extreme outliers and a significant standard deviation. Most people are not billionaires, AFAIK.

Income is a great example of something that is not normally distributed. First, the normal distribution is over the entire real interval (-∞, ∞), while income is over a partially-bounded interval [0, ∞). Secondly, there's a very long tail on the upper end, but a hard-stop (at zero) at the low end. I would expect it to look more like a Pareto distribution [0], with a bit of a hump at the low-end.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

I was probably too terse. My point was that the GP was talking about talent, not income, and however you define talent, it's probably roughly normally distributed like IQ.

If wealth was normally distributed that would be incredible!

pjc50 said "at least 50%", and it's clear he was being very informal about using the term "average".

I hate seeing an accurate post downvoted. I mean sure, you're being a tad pedantic, but if you can't be pedantic here then where can you be? :/

Measures of central tendency all have strengths and weaknesses but the fact that outliers strongly skew the mean is one of its textbook weaknesses.

I find it obnoxious when someone interprets a post uncharitably just to say it's wrong. It erodes the quality of discourse by forcing writers to expend time and words preempting pointless gotchas.

I, on the other hand, find it obnoxious when people are saying things that are obviously wrong.

Claim: "The majority of drivers are better than average."

Stupid person: "That impossible, 50% are worse than average."

Me: "You obviously can't math."

To be fair, I think my initial reading of the post in question might have been too charitable. A few bits don't make sense with any interpretation I can think of.

Actually, it's only within their own group that 50% will be below average. For what we know, anywhere between 0..100% may be below average of the entire workforce, which is what they're competing against.

Nothing in their argument requires such a dichotomy - just that the "talented" people who can afford to live in these areas are drawn from all across the US, meaning that most of the young people living there are priced out. Think about Silicon Valley, for example, and what happens to all the people who grow up there without the qualifications and skills to work in the tech industry.

>The affluent and the talented are flooding into superstar cities and tech hubs, creating a vicious competition for space that is pushing out the young

The above quote certainly is asserting a talented/young dichotomy, as well as an affluent/young dichotomy.

It's either deeply-engrained bias or sloppy writing. Pick one, depending on your level of cynicism.

Don't be daft! Millenials can't be talented. Anything worth paying attention to was created before 1989.

You're wrong - Taylor Swift was born in 1989.

Since when is she worth attention?

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