The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

by Todd Rose

Astronomers believed that every individual measurement of a celestial object (such as one scientist’s measurement of the speed of Saturn) always contained some amount of error, yet the total amount of aggregate error across a group of individual measurements (such as many different scientists’ measurements of the speed of Saturn, or many different measurements by a single scientist) could be minimized by using the average measurement.20 In fact, a celebrated proof by the famous mathematician Carl Gauss appeared to demonstrate that an average measurement was as close to a measurement’s true value (such as the true speed of Saturn) as you could ever hope to get.21 Quetelet applied the same thinking to his interpretation of human averages: he declared that the individual person was synonymous with error, while the average person represented the true human being.22