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Rather than suggesting that people should strive harder to conform to an artificial ideal of normality, Daniels’s analysis led him to a counterintuitive conclusion that serves as the cornerstone of this book: Any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail.
fallacy of average
centered on a new guiding principle: individual fit. Rather than fitting the individual to the system, the military began fitting the system to the individual.
individual : system
They designed adjustable seats, technology now standard in all automobiles. They created adjustable foot pedals. They developed adjustable helmet straps and flight suits.
adjustability
changing the system was not an intellectual exercise—it was a practical solution to an urgent problem.
practicality
Rather than comparing people to a misguided ideal, they could have seen them—and valued them—for what they are: individuals. Instead, today most schools, workplaces, and scientific institutions continue to believe in the reality of Norma. They design their institutions and conduct their research around an arbitrary standard—the average—compelling us to compare ourselves and others to a phony ideal.
thesis
three principles of individuality—the jaggedness principle, the context principle, and the pathways principle.
jaggedness context pathway
Today we have the ability to understand individuals and their talents on a level that was not possible before.
why even good profiling of killers and suicides are NOT predictive or trsnsferable to other individuals? Each of us walks our own story alone
Eventually, I decided to stop trying to conform to the system and instead focused on figuring out how to make the system fit to me.
what Scott Fritz inpired me to do re writing instruction
Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I am now the director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program.
Harvard study center
(referred to as the “random effects model”
random effects
According to the key assumption behind the method of the Average Brain, most people’s brains should be fairly close to average.
assumed individual :average relationship
The implications are hard to ignore: if you build a theory about thought, perception, or personality based on the Average Brain, then you have likely built a theory that applies to no one. The guiding assumption of decades of neuroscience research is unfounded.
Average Brain fallacy
Every discipline that studies human beings has long relied on the same core method of research: put a group of people into some experimental condition, determine their average response to the condition, then use this average to formulate a general conclusion about all people.
paradigm flaw
the most important scientist you have never heard of, a young Belgian by the name of Adolphe Quetelet.
Quetelet
In fact, Galton agreed with almost all of Quetelet’s ideas, save one: the idea that the Average Man represented Nature’s ideal. Nothing could be further from the truth, claimed
Q championed the mean. G championed the excess.
Those who were far below average Galton termed “the Imbecile.”
the deficient
the Eminent, the Imbecile, and the Mediocre
G minimum classes
Galton carved up humankind into fourteen distinct classes, ranging from the “Imbeciles” in the lowest rank through the “Mediocre” in the middle ranks all the way up to the most “Eminent” members of the highest rank. This was a monumental shift in the meaning of average, transforming the notion of normality into mediocrity.
G's ranks
“As statistics have shown, the best qualities are largely correlated,” wrote Galton in 1909.
BS
To help him prove the existence of rank, Galton developed new statistical methods, including correlation,
corelation as a support of rank
Galton who almost single-handedly supplanted Quetelet’s conviction that human worth could be measured by how close a person was to the average with the notion that worth was better measured by how far a person was from the average.
Galton favor excess
The Age of Average—a cultural era stretching from Quetelet’s invention of social physics in the 1840s until today—can be characterized by two assumptions unconsciously shared by almost every member of society: Quetelet’s idea of the average man and Galton’s idea of rank. We have all come to believe, like Quetelet, that the average is a reliable index of normality, particularly when it comes to physical health, mental health, personality, and economic status. We have also come to believe that an individual’s rank on narrow metrics of achievement can be used to judge their talent. These two
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fundamental assumptions oa Age of Average
for most of us, it is Galton’s legacy that clenches itself around our personal life in a more vivid and intimate manner.
Galton > QQUETELET today
from the perspective of the new social sciences, the individual was almost entirely irrelevant.
role of individual in Age of Average
It might seem that there is some fundamental difference between saying a person scored in the 90th percentile and saying that a person is an introverted type, but both ultimately require a comparison to an average score. These two approaches merely reflect an alternate interpretation of the same underlying mathematics—but share the same core conviction: individuality doesn’t matter.
Q & G commonality
averagarians. This term is so useful and apt that I employ it to describe anyone—scientists, educators, managers—who use averages to understand individuals.
averagarians
the law of large numbers, a law which, according to a great mathematician’s expression, is always true in general and false in particular.”
law of large numbers
Typing and ranking have come to seem so elementary, natural, and right that we are no longer conscious of the fact that every such judgment always erases the individuality of the person being judged. A century and a half after Quetelet—exactly as the poets and physicians of the nineteenth century feared—we have all become averagarians.
consequence of Q and G
the entire workplace was designed according to the tenets of averagarianism, the supposition that individuals can be evaluated, sorted, and managed by comparing them to the average.
workplace impacts (remember Proudfoot at Melroe)
How, precisely, did averagarianism go from an abstract ivory tower conjecture to the pre-eminent organizational doctrine of businesses and schools across the world? The answer to this question largely centers on a single man named Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Frederick Winslow Taylor
believed that he could systematically eliminate inefficiency from business by adopting the core precept of averagarianism, the idea that individuality did not matter.
EXACTLY what efficiency experts sell Did Deming REALLY blend qualitative with quantitative?
Taylor, “in the future the system must be first.”
system > individual critiqued in Metropolis and Modern Times
in the 1890s, Taylor began sharing a new vision for industrial organization that he suggested would minimize inefficiency in the same way that the method of averages was presumed to minimize error.
efficiency
For Taylor, there was nothing worse than a worker trying to do things his own way.
what maddens Bohe and me
Taylor in a 1918 magazine article. “It is thoroughly illegitimate for the average man to start out to make a radically new machine, or method, or process to replace one which is already successful.”
how does innobation become a flaw?
The worker, once celebrated as a creative craftsman, was relegated to the role of automaton.
totally new labor standard : ability to be stamdard
in each and every organization my job was standardized according to Taylor’s belief that “the system must be first.”
"house rules"
In a standardized system, individuality does not matter, and that was exactly what Taylor intended.
what Bohe and I hate
He argued that businesses should take away all planning, control, and decision making from the workers and hand it over to a new class of “planners” who would be responsible for overseeing the workers and determining the one best way to standardize an organization’s processes. Taylor adopted a recently invented term to describe this new role: “the manager.”
birth of management
But Taylor insisted this view was all wrong. Factories needed brains to direct the hands.
METROPOLIS directly addresses this
“In our scheme, we do not ask for the initiative of our men. We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say, and do it quick.”
basic training
First, ‘What is the name of the man I am now working for?’ and . . . ‘What does this man want me to do?’ The most important idea should be that of serving the man who is over you his way, not yours.”
why direct supervisor determines job satisfaction
scientific management—often simply called “Taylorism”—swept
"Taylorism"
industries.
milotaries had been doing this lomg before, right ?
the organizational chart (“org chart”) a new focal point.
org chart
Personnel and human resources departments
Taylorism inaugurated planning departments, efficiency experts, industrial-organizational psychology, and time-study engineering.
occupatoonal engineering
management consulting industry
President Franklin Roosevelt’s system of national planning was explicitly modeled on Taylorism.
Hoover had used engineering to try to solve US problems
Even though Taylorism was often equated with American capitalism, its appeal crossed borders and ideologies.
appeals to totolitarianism, objectification, authoritarianism
