Just remember, everyone, the average human has approximately one testicle and one ovary. Just because something’s average, doesn’t mean you’ll ever actually see it.
It could happen.
That means I’m above average, um, in the sack. Woo hoo!
The average human also has less than two legs.
Absolutely. This experiment illustrates the difference between the average and the typical.
Another thing to consider is what is being averaged and what is not. The software is designed to produce some sort of mean of the shapes and proportions of the faces and features. It is not designed to produce the mean of the attractiveness of the faces (I don’t know how you would do this). The fact that average attractiveness is not preserved when the average shape and proportion is calculated should not be too surprising. What is is interesting is that this type of averaging produces attractive results so consistently.
I’d like to see this same experiment done with faces that are considered very attractive. What would the average of Charlize Theron, Halle Berry and the like produce? It wouldn’t surprise me if the average of a set of beautiful faces were a little less attractive than the typical face in the set.
Actually, just taking the site I linked to, you’d be correct. But in the new issue of NatGeo magazine (I just got it in the mail last week, so I believe it’s March), there’s a poster with the picture of the Han Chinese guy, and the poster details that there are 1.01 men to every woman in the world, and with China being the most populous country…well, that’s how they came up with that particular average of everyone.
So the poster included with the magazine actually gives details the site doesn’t.
Remember that you can only take the arithmetic mean (which is the kind of average you presumably intended) of a numerical variable. Similarly for medians. People have properties that can be expressed numerically, but we are not numerical quantities.
You can say “the average number of testicles that a human has is one; ditto the average number of ovaries,” but you can’t say that the average person has one of each.
With respect to people, people often use ‘average’ as a synonym for ‘typical’ which is a perfectly reasonable colloquial use, so long as nobody tries to pretend it’s a mathematical or statistical term of art.
The average white American guy is Ben Affleck?
I was thinking the same thing.
Also, the Vatican City, measuring as it does 0.5 km2, has an average of 2 popes/km2.
Yep. Take away language and clothes and I’ve still yet to meet anyone who can reliably tell the difference between Chinese Japanese and Koreans (maybe Taiwanese too).
He looks just like a sales rep that works in my office - weird.
Yes, in fact I actually uttered the word ‘‘damn’’ out loud. Holy shit.
I think so. Just as one example, my Japanese ex-wife used to swear that she could tell them apart because of facial features. I tested her on Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans and Chinese-Americans, and she consistently failed.
My wife is also ethnically Han Chinese (with perhaps a tiny bit of Taiwanese aborigine, but of unknown percentage). However, since she’s lived in Japan for 12 years, any buys clothes here, then people can never get her right. She’s mistaken for Japanese in Japan; Korean in Korea; and Vietnamese in Vietnam, which also has a ethnic Chinese population.
Note that this test is not a test of facial features, but of hair and clothes. Also note that the pictures are at least several years old. Are we surprised that the men with the yellowest hair are Japanese?
Genetically, the groups are closely related, if not indistinguishable, which makes listening to the self-proclaimed experts amusing.
Exactly.
Exactly- too many of the readers here are equating average with typical.