Is Being Average the Norm?

Thank you very much Sonya I think especially the perspective on yeah what is important like I think I had not thought about that before you know, at different stages of my life I have been interested in different things like as the hobbies and I have, you know, at that time that thing has more important as you said, if I may ask a follow up on the bug point where you were talking about our understanding

like, you know, in, when, as you said, like there are different heights or different abilities.
And now in this society we try to characterize everything or enumerate everything.
So there is this concept of bell curve in sciences and mathematics and engineering.
So where the curve looks, you know, with a,

where there is a maximum number of people are in the middle and then there are outliers.
So in that situation the place where the maximum number of people are is called the norm which is called normal and it's essentially called it is the reference point.
But as you also said that there is actually no reference point.
So I don't know if you have any thoughts about whether that norm of the bell curve is actually a reference point or is it, you know,

a kind of a, you know, a sort of a tradition or some sort of convention so yeah,

yes just because you're in the middle of the norm just because you're in the middle of the bell curve doesn't mean that's kind of the standard of reference point.

So another example is

so we have a school in kind of rural Korea in the countryside and their 30 students and we map their grades

said that the middle of the bell curve is 70 percent

and right around there there's a lot of people.

Then as you go further to the right past a certain standard deviation, you get kids getting 90 percent.

Then if you go to the left, you get kids going as low as 50 percent.

Then so we take the 90 percent kids from the school in the countryside then we put, we compare them to the students from all over the country.

So we take the best, the 90 percenters from the countryside and we create a separate class of 30 of 30 students basically the best countryside school students.
And we see the same thing happening.

So even among those 30 superior students from the countryside schools, you have the best students with the highest grades and you've got a student with the lowest grade.

So that kid who was the number one in his class now is number 30 in the new class of you know, high grade kids.
You know, that kid probably feels really inferior, really feel intimidated and bad about himself.

It's very hard to accept because the expectation for that kid is that he's always been the number one in his class.

However, you know, he is the same person his achievement, his academic knowledge is the same person whether he's number one in his class in a rural countryside school or his 30th of superior students chosen from all.

So that's why I say this is a matter of perception

in the olden days where there was a lot of discrimination based on either gender or social class your position in society was determined by how you were born or who you were born into.

But now we have less gender and class discrimination.
But instead what we have done is the, we are constantly judging and evaluating kids based on academic test scores.
So kids with lower test scores are basically facing a certain kind of emotional discrimination.

So while we say we have done away with a lot of discrimination, we are constantly kind of ranking kids according to what I've done and according to their academic achievements.
So psychologically we are constantly kind of putting them under stress

in a way through schooling we are creating the foundation of a new kind of hierarchy

still in the past, you know, just because depending on your status as a prince, for example, you are entitled to a lot of privileges.
Now through the hierarchy that based on your academic achievements, we individuals are feeling themselves entitled to privileges that's not afforded to others.
And society actually allows those privileges

in a ways we have recreated a system that we actually got ourselves over a system of entitlement except instead of your status, birth status, it's based on this one is based on your academic achievement that's been measured and quantified ever since you were little

in. That is leading to a larger and larger inequality between the rich and poor that is creating a lot of the social pressures and social resistance that we see.

So in the past, you know, the humanity grew up and we slowly realized that, you know, allotting privileges because of the status of your birth was unfair.
But having said that, in today's world, the driving narrative is that it's okay through open competition that if you have accrued the entitlements or privileges, then you are entitled to those and nobody questions your right to those privileges.

The losers in today's ultra competitive world believe they don't deserve certain privileges or entitlements because they have lost in this competition.
This is actually akin to slaves in the ancient world thinking they don't deserve or they need to they deserve to live like a slave because they're born a slave

and we think we, I think mistake ourselves into thinking that we have freed ourselves from these discriminatory systems.

But all we've done is replace an old paradigm of how we order the world with a new paradigm.
We haven't actually liberated ourselves from those paradigms.

Yeah that made a lot of sense to Nva.
Thank you so much for taking time for giving answer in such a detailed way.
Yeah both of that made sense and I just want the next person to be able to ask their questions.
Thank you so much for your detailed answer.