I’m sure by now, most of you have seen the video of Miss Teen South Carolina and her bumbling explanation of why 20% of Americans can’t find the US on a world map: kids in Iraq and South Africa don’t have maps, so let’s help Asia.
This was brought up at work today and one of my coworkers tried to explain to me that even though I think people [in general] are dumb as rocks, they’re much dumber than I think. He broke it down to essentially surrounding ourselves with the top 1% of the population (intelligence-wise) and never really interacting with the rest of the population except in passing. I was skeptical because this would mean that everyone I regularly interact with is over 2.5 standard deviations from the mean. But he threw out some plausible percentages, so I didn’t argue.
His argument: Only the top 10% goes to college, so everyone I met there was already well above the norm.
Counter: There were plenty of people at VT who were/are dumb as rocks. *Insert cheap shot at the Vick brothers*
Argument: Of that, only about half of them study something that would require them to be “smart.”
Counter: Not even the people in the smart majors were necessarily competent.
Anyway, reduce that percentage by the people who finish and/or go on to do something productive, etc.
Now, I know anecdotal evidence isn’t a good argument, but there are plenty of people I know who didn’t finish college and are smarter than the ones I went to school with. Granted, I have to factor in my personal filter. But I still found the whole discussion interesting. So, I decided to find out what the numbers really were.
I looked up the US Census Bureau
Fireproof hd
Keeping Mum full movie
download Winter of Frozen Dreams dvd The Cat in the Hat
The Hills Have Eyes II video to calculate the percentage of the population with whom I associate.
Approximately 54% of adult Americans have attended college in any form. About 30% earn an Associate’s or higher, but I’ll bump this up to 35% to be more representative of the people I know.
This might be an incorrect assumption, but I assumed that the breakdown of occupations in the civilian population was proportional to the people who studied those areas in school. The percentage of the population studying something that would require them to be “smart” is about a third.
Of course, the definition of smart is arguable, but I’m going with my biases since I’m calculating the people I would associate with. I took the percentage of people identified as professionals (professional, scientific, management, administrative, and waste management services) or related to education (educational services, and health care and social assistance).
So that brings us down to 12% of the adult population. And from that, I still think about half the professionals I meet should find something else to do. 6%? But that’s another anecdotal assumption…
Alright, so my coworker may have been using hyperbole with the 1%, but he wasn’t too far off. Man, anyone remember the Seinfeld episode where they calculated that only 1% of the population was datable? That’s how I’m feeling right now…Red Corner video
