Does The Average Person Exist? 

I called someone "average" once but it turns out I was just being "mean".

A pipe has a center of mass in a place where no there is no material.

So the military adage "One size fits no-one" is mathematically true.

The most special person that could ever live is the average one.

I really wanna find that German family who has that average of 1.4 children.

On a related note: did you know the Vatican is the only state with more than 2 popes per square kilometer?

I have an above average number of legs

That average guy from idiocracy was actually very unusual.

It's like playing a giant game of Guess Who and eliminating everyone.

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.

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'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!

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?"

The average person is extremely unique and surprising.

I don't know about average but if you want normal person just take a person and divide him by his size

Being a math man, shouldn't you be asking, "Does a mean person exist?"

How many legs does the average person have? Fewer than 2. Of course if we’re taking mean not mode

I'm earlier than the average person watching this video

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. 😂

"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

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.

Now, to get all those averages and use them in some game with quite complete character customization to recreate this "average" person

02.02.2020. Palindrome date coming up soon.

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.

Matt, I love your enthusiasm for life, it's contagious no matter the subject matter. I could listen to you all day. bravo.

I am reminded of the movie "Idiocracy", where two "average" test subjects are selected for a scientific experiment. Hilarity ensues.

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.

"The average person does not exist" is one of those sentences that has two very different meanings

that was really hilarious and interesting at the same time! love your vids, keep it up!

Using + in email is such a great gmail lifehack for organizing incoming email. Nicely done Matt!

That might be the smoothest plug for a book I've ever seen.

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.

@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.

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!

Military usually have 3 sizes: too small, too big, and the one-size-doesn't-actually-fit-anybody size.

Title : "Does The Average Person Exist?" Me : "Of course i know him, He's me"

This channel deserves more subscribers!

I love how these videos are mostly just bringing your book to life.

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

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.

Pre ordered!! Excited to get it!

I bought Humble Pi from the uk online to Canada when it was first released, I couldn't wait this long.

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...

all the children in Lake Woebegone are above average.

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.

Nice meeting you today in Boston. Maybe next time your here it wont be quite so cold. ;)

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...

Matt's next adventure: Finding the fractioned people.

This was a great video!

The wholesome message of this research is that no one is average! Each has unique features

Me, after measurement: "I was in the pool!"

At 4:23, the light turns on behind Matt.

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.

I really enjoyed this one 👍🏼

You can't ever be certain of anything

An example of the curse of dimentionality

I received my autographed page in the mail today. Page 109. Thanks Matt!

Very interesting, never thought about it

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.

We need "someone" to digitize the data and make it open source, so we can do all sorts of calculations on it

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.

Pre-ordered! :)

Hey look it's some more stand up maths I was just watching the ones from like 3 years ago

It would be much more odd if nothing were odd.

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.

i have your book, bought it at the train station. it's a fun read.i recommend it!

When I was at school, I used to tell people that I had more than the average number of arms. The reactions were interesting.

I'd love to meet the person who had 9 of my same measurements.

I liked the "classified" black bars, nice touch

Your book comes out on my 17th birthday.

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.

2019 was the year of BathWater Is 2020 going to be the year of random signed pages of a equally random government document??

I think it makes sense. If I randomly distribute 100 points in a 1 dimensional line from x=0 to 100, it's gonna be dense! If I take those same 100 points and distribute their y position randomly from 0 to 100, things are getting a lot more spaced out. And again, their z position from 0 to 100, things are getting much farther away from the average position. And again for their t position, their u position, and uhh I dunno what letters are common practice to use beyond 3D but you get the idea I'm sure. As hard as it is to visualize 10 dimensions, it's easy to see from 1D to 3D, that the more dimensions you add, the more opportunities things have to get farther away from the average position.

So happy you ended on "all"

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.

female, Australian. Age 37... I'm surprised I'd be the 'average' Australian in ANY criteria at all. Go figure

I reckon there's lots of interesting maths to do with trying to find the fewest sizes of uniform that will fit all the airmen, if you define the amount of error allowed in terms of uniform measurements to person measurements (eg. +- 3 cm of waist circumference classes as fitting).

If you haven’t heard it yet, you might also like the Planet Money Episode 936: The Modal American They find the average American, the the most common American. Super interesting math there too.

How long will you be in New England?

2:31 'a hand obsessed maniac' yare, yare daze

Planet Money, a podcast produced by NPR, did an episode called The Modal American (episode 936). It's perhaps a good followup to this great video.

I knew I had read about this story before. Of course it was in your book.

Oh, I'm earlier than planned

"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.

Oh man I read about these cockpit in a paper or a book somewhere else once, I cannot for the life of me remember where...

If anyone was thinking about purchasing Humble Pi, do it! I purchased the UK copy back when it came out and it is fabulous!

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.

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.

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?

A main plot element of the book The Lathe of Heaven is that the protagonist score d perfectly on the mean of any psychological test he took. I recall that he is described as "abnormally normal.". Or, it may have been " impossibly normal. " It is one of Ursula K. KeVin's best books.

Asking spefically for preordering might reduce the efficacy number-of-preorders as an indicator of a book's success. I guess it also might increase its efficacy though, and maybe a lot of people ask for preorders so maybe that could even be part of why it works in the first place.

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).

NIPPLE HEIGHT

you’re the type of guy i would enjoy a deep, philosophical discussion on existence with-if only there were more people like you out there

8:32 That makes sense. For 0.3 standard deviations on any one measurement (assuming a normal distribution), you'd expect 23.6% to be average.

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).