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Old 12-17-2004, 07:05 PM   #112 (permalink)
Ilow
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ARTelevision
Ilow, thanks, yes.

Basically, my response was intended to squelch a loaded rhetorical question. The simple answer would have been that the average intelligence in America is by definition "average" just as with the rest of humanity - allowing for cultural, health, and economic norms/situations and errors, problems, biases in the testing...
ART, I understand about trying to squelch that type of reasoning, sorry if I came off too harsh. To be honest, while I pretty much agree with you that America is basically average or on par with many other countries, I wish we could check other statistical data. We've been sort of talking about the statistical average or mean, but in some ways, I wonder if there is a difference in the distribution between countries etc. For instance, is the mode (the most commonly occurring score) or the median (the exact middle score) different? It seems that when you consider countries overall, they actually may be judged more by the extremes than the middle. I would imagine in more homogenious cultures there is less variation than in the US. I don't know it was just something I was thinking about. (What was this thread about again?)
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