This cracks me up because it is often said with such confidence, but it is just wrong.

If you have 10 people, 8 have an intelligence score of 1, 1 has a score of 5 and 1 has a score of 10. The average is 2.3 which means that 80% of the people are below average.

The median is the only thing that is going to guarantee 50%.

Carlin was a prophet

Yes, he is the Congressman for California's 54th district (it only has 52, but was probably still 53 when he started the satire account).

oh thank christ

That the bottom 25% of scorers in standardized tests are in the bottom quartile of the distribution, which is literally defined as the bottom 25%, but the Twitter user seems to be using that fact to justify something yet he's literally just stating a fact?

The bottom 25% will always exist and there will always be 25% of the results contained within it.

Not sure how anyone doesn't get it, but this Twitter screenshot exists, so there's that.

Oh, sorry, this "x" exists. Dumb fucking name.

Poe's law is a bitch.

It’s toxic and can lead to DEATH if inhaled! Big if true!

Plus, it's amazing that every student at least got placed on the graph. Missing that would be shameful.

Hey that's a sly insult :D

I'm definitely gonna use that one later.

I'm shocked

Also, everyone would be in the bottom quartile. The definitions fall apart when you collapse the probability function.

I’m overthinking this.

If everyone gets the full mark, it’s not a random variable anymore, you would have a collapse of the probability distribution, that would tend to a Dirac delta function. In this case, the very definition of “quartiles” would fail. So, yeah, there would be no one there because it wouldn’t exist.

No, this is how a graph showing quartiles will always look because quartiles, by definition, always include a fixed percentage of the studied population under them.

In this case the lower quartile will always have 25% of the population under it, 50% under the second quartile, and 75% under the third quartile.

Quartiles break a population into 4 equal portions.

At the end of the day, reducing intelligence down to one single number is already kind of questionable. What does it mean for someone to be 1 point more intelligent than another person?

Is there a c/woosh?