In the 2016, the United States produced a book entitled “The end of the average,” Tode Ross, a professor of pedagogy at Harvard University, who focused on human behavior and individuality. The book argues that there is a underlying logic behind the complex modern society, which is egalitarianism, but from modern science viewpoint, people are very complex species, and there are so many degrees of freedom that they simply cannot be averaged. In other words, a lot of averages don’t make any sense.
cz-rdf.en.alibaba.comHere is from the human physiology, psychology and ability of the three aspects to tell you, why the average indicator is not reliable. From the human physiology point of view, there is no standard figure, standard appearance, standard character and other concepts, the gap between people is much larger than we thought, no one really meets the so-called “standard.”
The book tells a story of aesthetics with an average. With an average aesthetic, the concept was used by Americans as early as the 1945. The book says there was once a well-known woman scientist who used the body data of 15,000 young American women to take the average, calculate a “standard American young woman” figure and shape a statue. The statue has a beautiful figure and is regarded as the perfect girl, and later there is an institution that hosts a beauty pageant where young women can send their body data to the organizers to see who is most like this standard person and can take a large sum of money.
The result: there is not a single person meet roughly the same statue data. Another example comes from the U.S. Air Force. During the same period, the US Air Force believed that the plane’s loss rate was too high. The expert’s judgment is that there is a problem with the design of the cockpit, in which the pilot feels particularly awkward and does not operate smoothly. So, in total, the Air force surveyed more than 4,000 pilots, each measuring 10 data, and then averaging the data to calculate the size of a US military “standard pilot”. They also set a more tolerence for each data. As a result, of the more than 4,000 pilots, all 10 indicators were on average and none were true man’s data. That is to say, in fact no one is a standard person. The difference between people is much larger than we thought, and it makes no sense to calculate the average.
Next look at the human psyche. When it comes to psychology, we generally talk first about what character a person is, which is a kind of psychological averaging, such as the constellation blood type and so on. But the book says that character must also not be generalized. In fact, the most scientific method is to pay attention to different situations, with “if …, be … “sentence to describe a person’s psychological characteristics. For example, a person’s character may be sometimes outgoing and sometimes introverted. You could say, “If this person is in front of a stranger, he behaves introverted, and if the person is in front of an acquaintance, he is outgoing. If the person is under pressure, he will behave a little introverted; if the person is in the office, he will behave particularly outgoing “and so on. In other words, if you’re going to ask me if this person is introverted or outgoing, I have to ask you what the situation you care about. Psychologists also further believe that not only introverted/extroverted is context-sensitive. Even the virtues of honesty, loyalty, and kindness are context-related.
A person can behave very kind in certain situations, is ruthless in another situation; a person may be friendly in front of a colleague but ruthless at home; a person may steal in a supermarket, but not cheat in the examination room; a child is very docile in front of the parents, but in school there is bullying …
So the contextual faction believes that people actually have no “natural character.” The latest psychological view is against the character type dividing this egalitarian thing.
Finally, from the point of view of human ability, the way to screen and manage talents in the past is to judge by the average of a certain ability, such as academic performance, the level of graduate institutions and so on. But the human ability is also multi-dimensional, take an average indicator to evaluate the ability of people also can not find outstanding talent.
When enterprises recruit people to examine the standards of talent, the same can not use egalitarianism. The book also says that Google has done an internal study to find out exactly which metrics are really effective when recruiting staff. The researchers looked at 300 indicators, none of which were particularly useful. However, they found that such facts are useful to the general company: first, it is a person’s college entrance examination results and graduation institutions and his ability to work does not have a relationship; second, whether it has ever won an award in a programming competition, but also has nothing to do with the ability to work; third, although in the university period of academic performance and work performance. But it works only within three years of graduation. That is, if a person has graduated for more than three years, it makes no sense to see his academic performance in college. Therefore, the specific problem to be specific analysis, to engage in egalitarianism, standard people that set does not have any meaning.