| where am i on the curve? |
 |
 |
 |
| Wednesday, 09 April 2008 08:41 | |
|
this week i"ve paid a lot of attention to the normal distribution curve. a lot of people know it as the bell curve, and there is considerable volatile debate about how it manifests itself in nature. more specifically, how it is reflected in the human race. the theory goes that the normal curve is centered around a mean (average). one standard deviation from the mean on either side encompasses about 68% of a population. two standard deviations from the mean, you"ll find 95% of the population. 3 standard deviations from the mean incorporates 99.7% of the population. what the heck does this have to do with people? well, if you put some human characteristics into the statistics and you sample a large enough sample size, you"ll find a normal distribution generally results. let"s say "height of adult american males". the average is 5"9". according to what i found on the webbyweb, the standard deviation is 2.5". so, 68% of the males in america are between 5"6.5" and 5"11.5". if you"re 6"5", you are 3 standard deviations to the right of the mean, meaning you are in something higher than the 99.7th percentile. your height is pretty exceptional. but if you play on the memphis basketball team, you feel pretty average (if not below-average). you have an issue here of sample size and probability of something being statistically significant enough to throw off a previously-held hypothesis that you are of "exceptional" height. it"s called a chi-square and it"s the complicated cocktail talk of statisticians. instead of boring you with the chi-square on height, i"ll bore you with a question i have been asking myself regularly. especially after going to sleep at 3 and waking up at 5:45 today to study. why do i feel so dumb? the difficulty of our curriculum (darden is known in the country as "boot camp") coupled with my unfortunate undergraduate major (art) make me feel really really stupid on a daily basis. then i step back and realize that i"m feeling below-average among the 7000 most elite mba students in the world. but does that mean i"m smart? certainly not in comparison to them. but is it a satisfactory comparison to put it in the context of the whole world? am i on the upper end of the curve"s tails even then? i really don"t know. and if i had one spare second, i might run a chi-square on it. |