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Saturday, February 17, 2007

What Larry said

In case it is of interest what Larry Summers actually said, you can read it here. My impression is that very few people who talk about it in sound bites have done so. Here is one passage of particular interest:
If one supposes, as I think is reasonable, that if one is talking about physicists at a top twenty-five research university, one is not talking about people who are two standard deviations above the mean. And perhaps it's not even talking about somebody who is three standard deviations above the mean. But it's talking about people who are three and a half, four standard deviations above the mean in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class. Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out [i.e., out on the right tail of the associated bell-shaped curve].
Regardless of what you think of Larry Summers or the exactly even distribution of aptitudes and abilities among persons, this is something—like the base-rate fallacy—that is good to understand when reasoning from and about statistics.

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posted at 1:50 PM

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