SC
2 min readJul 11, 2022

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No. Half of us are below average drivers. Being “below average" doesn’t necessarily make you a “bad" driver. How are we defining bad? How are we defining good?

Further, not every grouping of a population lays out along a linear curve as you suggest in your piece. Lots of times you get the infamous bell shaped curve, where 60 - 80% of a population lie in the middle of the bell and 10–20% lie at the extremes.

In the case of driving, this is likely true. That means people’s perceptions are correct. 80% of people are “good” drivers because most drivers are average or better drivers.

It’s meaningless to ask people if they are a “good” driver on a matter where the population will naturally skew along that bell shaped curve. It would be better to ask if they felt they were a dangerous, average, or exceptional driver. Then your poll might mean something.

Frankly, if you ask me if I’m a good driver, I’m going to think along the lines of “Well, I’ve never driven drunk and killed someone, I understand the rules of the road and follow them, I’ve never been the cause of an accident or been in one" so yeah, I’m a good driver. Would I do well on a Formula One track in a high performance vehicle? Absolutely not. But, I might still fall below the median line because I don’t have much experience with Interstate driving through large cities. I’ve never navigated through NYC or LA, for example.

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This is why I fucking hate psychologists. They do this shit all the time and then write up nonsense papers based on their often archaic and Victorian feelpinions and get everybody in a tizzy. It’s important to understand the relevance and structure of the question and how the maths work applied against it.

Don’t even get me started on “alpha male".

Spinning some propaganda of your own? Cause this is exactly how a lot of propaganda takes root in the first place. Trotting out some poorly designed study or poll, getting it “stamped" with expert approval, dressing it up to provoke people’s biases and emotions by handing it off to content science writers who don’t understand science or math (and often writing), and then hurling it into the ether for mostly mindless public consumption.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

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