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Comment by RileyKyeden | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad there are people who know what all this means so I can tap a button, say "navigate to the grocery store" to my phone, and not spend brain cycles learning and maintaining knowledge of the wide range of math/programming/engineering specialties I'd otherwise have to master.

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Everyone should know the central limit theorem though, simply for its own sake! It's worth the brain cycles :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

I had an intuitive sense of this. People saying "half the population has a below average IQ!" always elicited a head tilt from me. I just didn't know there was enough to say on the subject to fill a 8k word wikipedia article.

I'll file this next to the formula I whip up when I want to figure out how much a trip costs based on mileage and fuel prices.

It's sometimes important to actually work out the math to overcome cognitive biases and faulty intuition.

Phrasing the statement as "Think of how dumb an average person you meet on the street is. Now realize that half of all people are even more dumb than that." primes the brain to denigrate the intelligence of a random person, leading to a wrong conclusion.

Another example relates to your formula for fuel economy - some locales use distance-per-volume (miles per gallon) while others use volume-per-distance (liters per 100 km). Intuition may suggest that upgrading from a 15 mpg vehicle to a 20 mpg vehicle is comparable to going from a 30 mpg vehicle to a 35 mpg vehicle - but it's not! Using the reciprocal more accurately describes the emissions and costs related to different fuel economies over the wide range of values that you'll measure in modern vehicles: The example compares a 15.7 -> 11.6 L/100km change and a 7.8 -> 6.7 L/100km change. These units make it much easier to intuit the results.

Doing the math occasionally is a good habit to get into!

The intuition should be that "Half the population has below average X" is untrue for the vast majority of situations, because most real things have a skewed distribution.

AFAIK IQ is a peculiar case because of how IQ is defined.

A lot of natural processes produce results that are normally distributed. So given a large sample, a continuous value range, no bounds (or far away bounds) and a lack of obvious skew the intuition "half the population is below average" has a good chance to be (approximately) true.

Of course IQ is a made up thing that we just defined to behave that way.

Yes, the obvious counter-example is that almost the entire population has more than the average number of legs.

Haha an academic advisor of mine told me once that CLT was the only important thing I had learned that year.

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