Yeah, there’s probably some selection bias, but not so much that I can’t compensate for it. I think you misinterpreted me, or I wasn’t clear enough—nobody is average in every way, so I would have to be really stupid to mean “average everything including book-reading habits” when I said average. So what did I mean when I said “average?” Well, what seemed like the obvious interpretation to me was that I meant “average-ish IQ.” As in “I know people within 1 standard deviation of average IQ who like reading interesting things, and it’s a bad plan to respond to someone else’s personal experience with ‘you must be lying or stupid.’” A better choice would have been “then you’re very unusual” or “but I don’t, and here are some numbers.”
I bet that twelve books per year is a couple of standard deviations from the mean, and probably correlates with an intelligence a couple of standard deviations above the mean
Standard deviations may not be the best way to think about this distribution. They’ll lead you to picture it as exponential decay even though it isn’t. Plus that 1.8 books/yr number may be stuck in your head, even though that was sales (I bought 0 books this year). The median for reading was 7 books/yr in your linked survey. So if 25% read 0 books, that means the spread is big, putting 12 only around the 3rd quartile. I.e. less than 1 standard deviation above the mean of a bell-curve.
‘interesting’ books, which on this forum I take to be more likely to mean, say, Godel, Escher, Bach than The DaVinci Code
Nah, they wouldn’t be able to handle GEB. My prototype was Predictably Irrational. I’d guess about 1⁄5 of the sequence posts are that level (if “fluent” usage of the internet is also assumed), and with some editing (perhaps by some sort of directed community effort) that number could be raised to 1⁄3 (and not assuming internet fluency), containing most of the important stuff. Which is still several books worth, iirc.
Yeah, there’s probably some selection bias, but not so much that I can’t compensate for it. I think you misinterpreted me, or I wasn’t clear enough—nobody is average in every way, so I would have to be really stupid to mean “average everything including book-reading habits” when I said average. So what did I mean when I said “average?” Well, what seemed like the obvious interpretation to me was that I meant “average-ish IQ.” As in “I know people within 1 standard deviation of average IQ who like reading interesting things, and it’s a bad plan to respond to someone else’s personal experience with ‘you must be lying or stupid.’” A better choice would have been “then you’re very unusual” or “but I don’t, and here are some numbers.”
Standard deviations may not be the best way to think about this distribution. They’ll lead you to picture it as exponential decay even though it isn’t. Plus that 1.8 books/yr number may be stuck in your head, even though that was sales (I bought 0 books this year). The median for reading was 7 books/yr in your linked survey. So if 25% read 0 books, that means the spread is big, putting 12 only around the 3rd quartile. I.e. less than 1 standard deviation above the mean of a bell-curve.
Nah, they wouldn’t be able to handle GEB. My prototype was Predictably Irrational. I’d guess about 1⁄5 of the sequence posts are that level (if “fluent” usage of the internet is also assumed), and with some editing (perhaps by some sort of directed community effort) that number could be raised to 1⁄3 (and not assuming internet fluency), containing most of the important stuff. Which is still several books worth, iirc.