Making The Pond Bigger

I was a teenager not that long ago. Well, not that long ago. By that time, John McCain had entered the Senate. At that time, the internet was non-existent except in the highest levels of a small group of nodes. It was possible to look around me and take comfort in the false belief that I was really pretty smart compared to many people. Maybe even smarter than half the people around me, which would have made me one tiny spot above average.

The thing about statistics is that they are not easily mapped into properly meaningful ideas in the human brain. I use that word 'properly' for a reason – it is all too easy for them to be mapped into meaningful ideas with the wrong meaning. Take, for example, the last sentence in my first paragraph above. If I went around saying I was smarter than 50% of the population, I'd only be attributing slightly-above average intelligence to myself (however you measure that slippery concept of intelligence). But I'm sure it would be taken as some sort of elitist comment.

Let's be honest, though. I classify myself as 'pleasantly ugly' (i.e. a bit below average in looks), 'fairly intelligent' (i.e. at least about 1 standard deviation above the mean on most scales), 'normally fit' (i.e. within 1 standard deviation of the mean on most scales), and 'normally healthy' (i.e. within 1 standard deviation of the mean on most measurements of health).

All this self-assessment was not so easy to make when I was young. You only had the evidence of your immediate senses, and I had the disadvantage of going to a school in which lots of people seemed smarter and fitter than I did. As I grew up, however, I began to realise that the immediate population of my youth had been somewhat biased.

In other words, as the pond grew bigger, I realised that while there were amazingly huge numbers of people who were incredibly much smarter than I was, there were also perhaps more people who were not. This made me feel a lot better, although not that much better.

The point of all this really is that if you have spent your whole life in a small city-state, you should get out a bit. Look at as much of the whole pond as possible before you think of what kind of fish you are. This is increasingly important as access to the global pond opens up. This especially goes for people who are discontented with life after looking at their neighbours.

You know the kind: *grumble* *grumble* I only earn US$4000 a month and my monthly costs (after paying the bank and all the bills) are now US$3200 so I only save US$800 a month. My neighbour has US$16000 a month, so he can probably save US$12800 a month.

Well, that kind of pay probably puts you both in the top 2% of all wage earners in the world. In a small city-state, you can even determine very exact and accurate figures for what percentage of your pond-people earn more or less than you. What's scarier is that in this particular city-state which is the focus of my research into education reforms, it seems fair game to determine what the best primary schools are based on economic principles of supply and demand. That's not so bad, except that it might be true.

I guess the great thing about access to the whole pond via the Internet is that it's easier to find data about where you really are in life, if you need such things. I know a highly accomplished person who was #1 in everything, but ranked very poorly in the big pond; at the same time I knew one who was thought to be pretty low-ranked, but whose data when compared with the rest of the big pond made a big splash.

In the end, I suppose that the economically-minded fish will do the economically-minded rational thing and migrate to the parts of the pond with more food. Then they will grow bigger and fatter until the fishermen figure out where the big fish are.

Conclusion: somewhere between 1 and 2 standard deviations above the norm is fine; don't push your luck. Heh.