I love this quote from Carlin:
It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Carlin is exposing his own ignorance of statistics with this quote. It's akin to when people criticize the grammar of others whilst making a grammatical mistake.
Also even if that weren't true, "average" isn't necessarily synonymous with "mean". The mean, median, and mode are all types of averages.
Maybe don't be so quick to criticize next time.
Even though IQ is designed to be normally distributed do you really think it actually is a normal distribution? It's a lofty goal and I'm sure it gets as close as one can but does this perfectly match up with reality? I have my doubts, hence my claim that there's a decent chance Carlin's comment is wrong.
Yes, median and mode are averages but few people mean those when they say "average". I doubt Carlin was statistically sophisticated enough to use average instead of median. Had he meant the median I think it reasonable to assume he would have said median. Do you commonly say "average" when talking about the mode or median? I doubt it.
Maybe don't be so quick to criticize next time.
Perhaps we could both benefit from this sage advice.
Do you think when he says things like "Takes the cake. Ya know, say 'Boy he really takes the cake'...Where? Where do ya take a cake? to the movies?" That he's exposing his own ignorance of idioms?
> a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values
It's a big club and he was in it.
When he died his net worth was estimated to be around 10 million, but that came pretty late in life. For a lot of his life he was probably comfortable but far from wealthy.
We’re better off not living in world where no one can have an opinion unless it’s on a direct, currently lived experience. That’s some identity politics nonsense.
You can have any opinion you like, but if your opinion consists of passing around second hand sneers, it's a crappy low-value opinion. "It's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." - "haw haw look at all the dumb sleeping people being this new". That's not an opinion, not a valuable commentary, it's just sneering.
If you think his commentary isn’t useful, insightful, whatever, that’s fine. But basing your critique on his social/financial position is not good form.
Depending on where you live, if you don’t have 30-70 million in liquid assets, you are middle class (or below).