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I am left-handed. It was never an issue growing up. My maternal grandfather was also left handed. He was born in Austria in the second half of the 19th century. Being left-handed was "streng verboten," and he was trained (forced) as an infant to become right-handed.
When I was 14 I watched a BBC documentary about left-handedness. Apparently, left handed were said to be brighter, and the BBC journalists went all around the world showing you how left handed people were in all the best jobs.
At NASA there was ten top scientists and 6 of them were left handed, and were brilliant mathematicians.
The journalists also went through history and pointed out the amount of left handed people who were particularly clever. At the end of the program just before the credits came on they listed all the very bright left handed people there were. Paul McCartney came up amongst them, and so on.
The program was very convincing. So do you remember that experiment where a school teacher said to school children that blue eyed children were more clever and special than brown eyed children, and the blue eyed children were delighted and the brown eyed children got depressed. Well I remember the next day after watching that documentary thinking,' fuck it, I'm right handed, no wonder I'm so thick.'
Well, years later when I got the internet I did a search on that documentary and found out it was just a statistical flip, and that left hand people were on average no more intelligent than right handed people.
When I studied physics and we were told how important statistics was. So physicists will do the same experiment over and over again, and use statistics to get the averages, that you can't just go by one result.
It looks like those journalists who made that documentary never did their research properly. Perhaps they were right handed?
4 comments:
About those rational behavior assumptions... awkward and cringe worthy.
What if they were:
Left-handed?
Schizophrenic?
Ambidextrous?
Twins? (triplets!!! or worse :( )
Club-footed?
Cross-eyed?
or >1 Std-dev from the statistical median in ANY human characteristic?
Would you panic if they were part of the long tail? :(
I am left-handed. It was never an issue growing up. My maternal grandfather was also left handed. He was born in Austria in the second half of the 19th century. Being left-handed was "streng verboten," and he was trained (forced) as an infant to become right-handed.
When I was 14 I watched a BBC documentary about left-handedness. Apparently, left handed were said to be brighter, and the BBC journalists went all around the world showing you how left handed people were in all the best jobs.
At NASA there was ten top scientists and 6 of them were left handed, and were brilliant mathematicians.
The journalists also went through history and pointed out the amount of left handed people who were particularly clever. At the end of the program just before the credits came on they listed all the very bright left handed people there were. Paul McCartney came up amongst them, and so on.
The program was very convincing. So do you remember that experiment where a school teacher said to school children that blue eyed children were more clever and special than brown eyed children, and the blue eyed children were delighted and the brown eyed children got depressed. Well I remember the next day after watching that documentary thinking,' fuck it, I'm right handed, no wonder I'm so thick.'
Well, years later when I got the internet I did a search on that documentary and found out it was just a statistical flip, and that left hand people were on average no more intelligent than right handed people.
When I studied physics and we were told how important statistics was. So physicists will do the same experiment over and over again, and use statistics to get the averages, that you can't just go by one result.
It looks like those journalists who made that documentary never did their research properly. Perhaps they were right handed?
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