Does The Average Person Exist?
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- Опубліковано 19 чер 2024
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Download the two documents I was waving around:
Anthropometry of Air Force Flying Personnel (1950)
www.dropbox.com/s/44ob78otovj...
The "Average Man"?
www.dropbox.com/s/bsedsqvgboh...
Here is Caroline Criado Perez's book Invisible Women.
www.amazon.com/Invisible-Wome...
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Filming by Matt Parker
Editing by Alex Genn-Bash
Music by Howard Carter
Design by Simon Wright
MATT PARKER: Stand-up Mathematician
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I called someone "average" once but it turns out I was just being "mean".
Get out.
Being mean is my default mode.
I just got it.
Is it a joke or did you not mean it.
you really went sicko "mode" there
@@emadgergis6710 it's a very average joke
A pipe has a center of mass in a place where no there is no material.
I thought I had a stroke reading your comment :D
Not necessarily.
saint chuck Plato's pipe
@@saintchuck9857 what do you mean? Please try and explain to me a pipe that disproves the claim above
Of course there's material at the center of mass, there's what the pipe is transporting :)
So the military adage "One size fits no-one" is mathematically true.
314th like
🤔
The most special person that could ever live is the average one.
Or the least average one
@@thetntsheep4075
there can be two least average, though if there are certain limited perameters and the average is offset, then there can only be one
Is that what your girlfriend tells you? ;)
@Roach DoggJR not related to this video but I see you watch OneyPlays
I've said that we are unique and that's why we are normal
I really wanna find that German family who has that average of 1.4 children.
And bang the wife so they lose their average status?
@@B3Band no? ew? did you teally not get the joke?
And how do we define what 0.4 people are? *hides chainsaw*
There may be 1.4 children per family, but an average family has one child.
@Nina Abbey and Brittany Hensel come close, not German though.
On a related note: did you know the Vatican is the only state with more than 2 popes per square kilometer?
yes
All of them average!
not a state
@@MasterGhostKnight actually it is a state
Of all the statistical "paradoxes", this is the one that I like the most. That's brilliant.
I have an above average number of legs
the average is below 2
You should really get rid of the evidence
@@Karavusk NO WAY
Karavusk yes that’s why he’s above average
I have an above average number of all of my appendages/limbs.
That average guy from idiocracy was actually very unusual.
Hi there Cody! ;-)
Cody - I love your mars base series. It is cool to see plants growing inside a tank. Keep up the great work!
I was looking for a comment like this.
Cody!
Cody!
It's like playing a giant game of Guess Who and eliminating everyone.
Not really, as Guess Who is about finding a specific person, not the average person.
@@Liggliluff But that's the point. The average person is a very specific person. So specific that it does most likely not exist.
I read the title not as "Is there any one person who can be considered truly average?", and instead as "Is it considered average for a person to exist?"
You are truly not average
I read it as "is it possible to calculate an accurate average for humans"
100% of people that were surveyed were in existence at the time of the survey, we can therefore conclude that people who exist are such normies...
Loooooooollllllllll
I read it the same!
I'm incredibly chuffed to learn this; I have a memory of an argument from 25 years ago in my high school English class, after reading some poem about the average man, where I was vociferously arguing that there could be no such person, but was outnumbered 20 to 1. Take that, hazily-remembered classmates!
Can we analyze all these signed pages to find the average Matt Parker signature? Then check if Matt has ever signed his name this way.
I wonder whether the deviation would trend higher on his signatures compared to statistics about people.
Interesting thought!
I hope he tries it some time…
But at least for me I always sign slightly different, depending on the pen(cil) used, the surface the signature is written on, my mood, how rushed I am, etc. The most notable difference is probably the "mp" in "Lampe" and the little ring I most of the time make in the big "L" (because I sometimes instead make it a spikey shape).
I was feeling really clever because I already knew about this, until I remembered it was from reading your book.
You should find the largest set of criteria that have at least 1 person in the set. So you can find the most average person that exists. I guess.
@@harriehausenman8623 from a finite set of criteria to choose from. Sensible criteria, not useless ones.
I guess you could come up with infinitely many useless criteria whose average will match a particular person.
Somehow I have a feeling that I am that person...
Take the person whose sum of deviations from the average is the lowest.
@@jimi02468 Where are you from?
I don't know about average but if you want normal person just take a person and divide him by his size
I get it
Do you want to try amd make one?
וואו מדהים שאתה ישראלי
@@nathantagai436 אוי לא כמה יש כאן? האם יכול להיות שהבן אדם הממוצע שצופה במט הוא ישראלי?
I thought you just made the person stand perpendicular to some surface.
Being a math man, shouldn't you be asking, "Does a mean person exist?"
Mister Grinch.
It would be funny if a mean person was a mean person.
@@jimi02468 I think unfortunately they might be Karen, 33 y/o millenial with dyed blonde hair and is currently complaining to your manager.
You should expect the same result for the median or any other average you choose. The median would probably be the best possible scenario for finding an "average" person but it wouldn't help much.
@@carbon1255 i thought karen was a boomer. in any case in my experience shaniqua is meaner than karen.
The average person is extremely unique and surprising.
This can be interpreted as either: finding an average person is unlikely, or, most people have unique traits
How many legs does the average person have? Fewer than 2.
Of course if we’re taking mean not mode
*Less than
@@anononomous I hate that you're right
less leg, fewer legs
1.999999 legs
*assuming amputees are more common than polymeliacs
0:00 - That split-second delay at the beginning, staring at the camera before talking makes it feel like Matt was standing back there during the previous video in the playlist, patiently waiting for his turn. 😂
- The 0:00 timestamp does not work in UA-cam (Android) for some reason. Trying to think of a plausible reason why not?
@@gordonrichardson2972 🤔 works for me
I can replicate the link not working on phone with Android in UA-cam app
"Of these 2 men, 0 were also of approximately average in *crotch length*"
They weren't kidding, "most thorough going-over" indeed!
“Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” - GK
I'm earlier than the average person watching this video
At the time of writing that comment, such a statement is unknown to be true or false
On average this comment would be true.
@@RiverMersey at that time, is always false unless he's thr first one to see the video, any other time the avarage person is at least him + the first guy /2, an thus earlier than him alone
Edit: Assuming he writed that when he saw the video
brilliant
@@sas3dx many thanks for clarifying my original question with a mathematical answer. 😁
Which is also an answer that I suspected to be true
11:58 When Matt is in North America, not only does his book title change from "maths" to "math", so does his speech!
An admirable effort to make sure that we don't get confused.
Cicolas Nage - Surprisingly, yes. American audiences tend to "correct"' it to Math and ask "why is he saying maths when it's math?"; and inversely an audience of those from the UK (and presumably other countries) will correct it to the other way and make a claim that saying "math" is wrong
@@xPanda25 Just like "aluminium" - which is correct, of course.
@@fredericapanon207 When people say aliminium I go nuke-you-lar /s
Now, to get all those averages and use them in some game with quite complete character customization to recreate this "average" person
It would be pretty cool if there was a way to measure the character customisation numbers from all the characters created in Skyrim, and then make the average character there.
@Yevhenii Diomidov oh... didn't think about that one xD
You're probably better off using something like Makehuman.
"The average person does not exist" is one of those sentences that has two very different meanings
I am reminded of the movie "Idiocracy", where two "average" test subjects are selected for a scientific experiment. Hilarity ensues.
And maybe, "Spies Like Us"?
That was because of the electrolytes.
Steve Davison It’s what plants crave
I was about to say. We already know the average man, and his name is Not Sure.
The opening scene of Idiocracy features the most average man in the world who's so freaklishly average that it defies statistics. It was a great and funny scene by itself, but seeing this video just made it even better
Matt, I love your enthusiasm for life, it's contagious no matter the subject matter.
I could listen to you all day. bravo.
I would like to point out that the average person does indeed not exist because there have been more humans in the past then there are currently alive.
02.02.2020. Palindrome date coming up soon.
Oooooh!
for a perfect symmetry on 8 segments display, it will be 05.05.2020
TheRealKingOfTigers nice
@@thesteaksaignant 7 segment*
Remember when we actually knew which day it was 😞
The story that I always heard about this 'average man' problem in the air force usually mentioned safety as one of the driving factors. I.e. the cockpits designed for average fit nobody in particular and resulted in decreased pilot in-flight performance. I am not sure how true that story is, but it fits well alongside the flight suit design.
Military usually have 3 sizes: too small, too big, and the one-size-doesn't-actually-fit-anybody size.
Greg K
That’s just off-the-rack clothing in general.
That might be the smoothest plug for a book I've ever seen.
Title : "Does The Average Person Exist?"
Me : "Of course i know him, He's me"
You're lucky. I don't even know myself.
I don't seem to remember ever owning a droid.
@standupmaths Probably almost everyone missed it, but I see what you did with the use of the singular "they" early on, and the "which is characteristics of all" near the end. Thumbs way up from me. Keep it up, and I support the subtle way you did it. Really nice work, seriously.
that was really hilarious and interesting at the same time!
love your vids, keep it up!
This makes me wonder if the data was analysed to see who was the MOST average subject. As in, who was average in the most measurements? It would be interesting to see the distrubution of "averageness" in the sample.
Also what is the average degree of averageness among the population
@@stationshelter Or what is the most average group of average people of the average of the population
Matt's next adventure: Finding the fractioned people.
I'm stoked to see such a good video about this.We were taught about this in Education, when we were reminded that we shouldn't design classes for the "average student" seeing as they likely don't exist. Instead we should do what the air force did here, design it to be flexible enough to fit as many as we can.
They showed us the Todd Rose TED talk, but he obviously didn't have the opportunity to go deep into the statistics. I thought maybe he'd exaggerated the results slightly, for emphasis, but it turns out that the results are even more stark than he led me to believe. The fact that they were so generous with what they defined as "average" but it still only takes 10 parameters to have excluded all 4000 participants just blows my mind!
Using + in email is such a great gmail lifehack for organizing incoming email.
Nicely done Matt!
Me, after measurement: "I was in the pool!"
I feels weird to see this much "preorder now" stuff about a book I've read or rather listened to AGES ago... International release dates are weird...
This channel deserves more subscribers!
Nice meeting you today in Boston. Maybe next time your here it wont be quite so cold. ;)
We need "someone" to digitize the data and make it open source, so we can do all sorts of calculations on it
When talking about continuous characteristics like `age` or `height` this ends up creating an histogram of the population and the number of people in each bucket depends entirely on the size of the buckets we choose to use. Using 1-year buckets is completely arbitrary, we could just as well group by decades or the month of each year… Then we use these buckets to calculate the average or median. It's very arbitrary, we can change the result by changing the size of the buckets.
There was a great Planet Money podcast about the same topic btw.
While binning choice can certainly cause particular problems with particular kinds of analysis I don't see how that would be a problem here.
First, the "bucket" size here seems to be very small. As he flicks the pages you can see that weight is measured to the nearest tenth of a pound, and lengths to the nearest millimetre. The difference between these measurements and the true values are thus quite small.
Second, the calculation of the mean or median, or standard deviation, once you have this data doesn't really depend on this precision. Heck, assuming the rounding of the measurements isn't systematically biased then the uncertainty in the mean is going to be way smaller than the uncertainty in any one measurement, so those averages are probably extremely good, and making more precise measurements wouldn't help.
The only really arbitrary choice here is that "average" is within about 0.3 standard deviations of the mean. And given that encompasses about a quarter of the population for each parameter I think that's pretty generous. If you made it smaller it would only reinforce this result, and if you made it much larger you'd run into the problem of most people being average, which kind of defeats the purpose.
I bought Humble Pi from the uk online to Canada when it was first released, I couldn't wait this long.
Pre ordered!! Excited to get it!
I'd love to meet the person who had 9 of my same measurements.
An example of the curse of dimentionality
I was gonna share this video around as to add to a point I'm often trying to make: The average person doesn't exist, neither do normal people. But then you advertised your book 3 times! 3 ... TIMES! And suddenly I'm not as comfortable sharing this, as it feels like I'm sharing an ad, rather than the idea that "the average person doesn't exist"... I might buy the book though :P
Somehow I just found it extremely eery to watch a video shot in the before times of Corona. I felt like we will never live that free ever again.
It will be nothing but a memory. Forever.
all the children in Lake Woebegone are above average.
Every one of them.
All the woman are strong
@@lvdovicvs Once on a concert.
The band "There are 2 genders the strong one and the loving one. I think you women can agree that you are the strong ones."
Women agreeing
The ban "Good that means we man are the loving ones..."
@@PeterAuto1 "there are two genders"
"What is 'Things you can't say anymore thanks to the Twitter mob'"
@@brianmiller1077 Well, it's a statement which isn't quite true, because humans are more complex than most people imagine.
When I was at school, I used to tell people that I had more than the average number of arms. The reactions were interesting.
If you count the USA, the average is what, 6?
Having said that, do you count say, kitchen knives?
I received my autographed page in the mail today. Page 109. Thanks Matt!
I love how these videos are mostly just bringing your book to life.
It would be much more odd if nothing were odd.
I thought this was gonna be about the hypothetical completely average person: someone who for example is about half male, half female and only a little bit intersex, someone who has about one job, but also a little bit of every job, someone who only travels to a few countries in their life, but was born in all of them.
I was not disappointed by what I got though.
This was a great video!
Fascinating video! That little number of "average" subjects is expected, though. If at each step a fraction *_f_* of the remaining subjects is selected, and *_n_* steps of selection are made, then at the end there will remain *_f^n_* of the initial subjects. For example, if *_f_* =0.5 (at each step select 50% of the subjects closest to the mean) and *_n_* =10 (ten measurements considered) then at the end the process will select 0.5^10 ~ 0.1% or 1/1000 of the subjects.
11:23
I would like to contest that remark... I have yet to find a car in which I can actually drive completely comfortably. And I work at a car dealership, so I drive a lot of different cars...
I'm reminded of Meet the Applegates, a movie from the 90's. From memory, I think they were aliens trying to blend in and not be noticed, so they assumed identities as average Americans but then got noticed and won an award for being the most average family in America. Or something like that. I haven't seen it in like 20 something years.
And then there is the character in Hitch Hiker's Guide who chose the most common name he could find, "Ford Prefect"
I was going to mention that movie too, they were insects from South America though, not aliens. And the bug posing as the "Dad" hacked a government database to input them as being average deliberately, which is how they were noticed.
I really enjoyed this one 👍🏼
A squirrel runs to the right after Matt says 'discovered' at 2:42
I promise I'm paying attention to the real content of the video...
You can't ever be certain of anything
Are you sure?
@@Milamberinx Potentially
Hey look it's some more stand up maths I was just watching the ones from like 3 years ago
i have your book, bought it at the train station. it's a fun read.i recommend it!
speaking of the "90% fit" rule, it is a near constant annoyance to be outside this range. As a tall guy I constantly encounter things that are too short or small. Like car seats that don't go back far enough, or their roofs being too low for that matter.
At 4:23, the light turns on behind Matt.
2019 was the year of BathWater
Is 2020 going to be the year of random signed pages of a equally random government document??
I'm shocked nobody has 2.37 children.
I did not watch this video to the end. I watched it an average length of time.
female, Australian. Age 37...
I'm surprised I'd be the 'average' Australian in ANY criteria at all.
Go figure
Well, if we use the criteries as as close to average australian as possible, than more closely average australians live outside austrialia, than inside:
Female, 37, lives in australia: the first means around half, the second means very simplisticly 1%, so these three makes half percent of australia's population: 25 million * 0.005 = around 125K.
But, if we want at least two of these, that means half and of the other half 1% added together: ~12,6M
And if we want the same in non australians, that is half percent of the entire population of earth (minus australian, but that is a rounding error in this case), 7,5 billion * 0.005= around 37 million.
And this will be true for almost any more additional average australian trait.
Called karen.
I still don’t understand why the AF thought - even at first - finding a literal average person would help them with their design work. Seems obvious to us today, but I guess it was revolutionary at the time.
They didn't, so they did a study to prove it.
The wholesome message of this research is that no one is average! Each has unique features
Very interesting, never thought about it
How long will you be in New England?
2:31
'a hand obsessed maniac'
yare, yare daze
4:19 Matt: The number of average Australians went to zero.
Street light: *blink*
I liked the "classified" black bars, nice touch
Me: **exists**
The title: I don't think so
I thought this would be talking about the average person throughout all history of mankind and that the average person would be dead, but hand measurement works too.
I've forwarded you my preorder email, however I purchased it on audible so I understand if that doesn't count, but you miss almost 100% of the shots you don't take (this accounts for the possibly of accidentally making a shot [i.e. tripping and hitting the puck into the goal]) so I thought I'd give it a go. Love your content, keep up the great work.
If we find them, we should freeze them for a year to see what happens.
"Does the average person exist?" is a very different question than "does the average man exist?" as asked by the Air Force. Humans are bimodal - the average height, for instance, is one standard deviation above the average female height and one standard deviation below the average male height.
The average height of a 5 year old male is several standard deviations lower than the average height of a 30 year old male.
Bimodal or not, the results are the same - there was no average airman in their study across even a few metrics
Only if your humans are all from the same ethnic background. Once you bring in different races, there’s a lot more overlap between male and female height. A Dutch woman for example is going to a lot taller than a Sri Lankan man.
Katrina Bryce das raycis. u bein heightist an sheeeit mayn
NIPPLE HEIGHT
Dang. Now I wish I hadn't gone to the trouble of ordering your book when it came out in the UK. Still...if I waited I wouldn't have had the pleasure of reading it already.
Disqualified from being average for "crotch length," brutal >_<
"So sorry, Corporal! You were nearly our very own average military man; unfortunately your 'little private' wasn't long enough."
I think I'd instantly wither away to dust if I ever found out. Hopefully all the data was properly anonymized!
Oh, I'm earlier than planned
Speaking of averages, did you know that "on average, everybody in the Universe has 2.6 legs and owns a hyena" (bless you Douglas Adams, my education at an early age.)
Your book comes out on my 17th birthday.
2:28
Killer Queen has already touched the study
also 4:22 light comes on and turns off
did you ask the maintenance folks to hold off for continuity?
I was searching for this comment. Come on UA-cam, you're letting us all down this time...
So if it happened that there were a few people who had average measurements in all characteristics, then a lot of products would be inflexibly designed to accommodate them? instead of fitting the middle 90%?
What about the expected person?
Harrie Hausenman - no one expects the Spanish Inquisition
@@xPanda25 You rang?
Pre-ordered! :)
I like to watch your videos, when procrastinating with my masters degree work.
One day a friend of mine was talking about someone they met who was "so completely unremarkable it was kind of amazing." So we had a discussion: can someone be so average that it's actually remarkable? I thought about it, and this thought experiment quickly came to mind.
(1) Let's assume all traits possibly pertinent to the issue fall in a normal distribution.
(2) Let's define being "average" or "unremarkable" in a given trait means falling within one standard deviation from the mathematical mean.
(3) Let's assume that all these traits are independent of one another.
So, we know that for any given trait, if the distribution of values in our population is normal, then about 68% of the population will fall within one standard deviation from the mean for that trait. The other 32% will fall above or below (and are thus "remarkable").
Let's simplify that for a moment to 50-50, a coin toss. Heads, your "average;" tails, your "remarkable" in that trait. If all the traits in question are independent of one another, then being "average" in all possible traits being assessed would be like the probability of getting all heads. If there are N traits, that's (1/2)^N. If we take back our simplification and use 68% instead, that's (.68)^N. Either way, the more traits we are including, the higher N will be, and the less likely the probability is that a person is "average" or "unremarkable" in every way.
Thus, no matter what threshold we define for "remarkably unremarkable," given a big enough N total number of traits to consider, we can define a person who is completely "average" in N out of N of those traits to fit that threshold, and thus be rather remarkable.
Anyway, I thought this thought experiment and conversation I had with my friend was very similar to the topic of no "average" person existing (though I defined "average" a bit more broadly).
That is interesting. Actually, to be the average person, you have to have no hobbies or things (books, bands, movies, animals or whatever) you like, because there are less people who are into anything than there are not. I think it's just impossible to live the most boring life on earth.
@@taysem321 May be impossible, but this person my friend met apparently came pretty close, lol XD.
@@rdreher7380 are they Walter Mitty or something?
I wonder if this is where the science of economics started? (And, as "Invisible women" illustrates, the tendency to only use males for measurements, ignoring that females tend to have a different distribution of physiological measurements).
I hit the same problem with a sample size of just two.
When I was trying to build a go-kart to fit both my children.
The integral from zero to zero of the normal distribution curve is zero.
What if there’s an infinitesimally small rectangle of area 🤨