Smarter Than The Average Bear

The phrase "smarter than the average bear" has been around at least as long as I have and I have always taken it to mean "highly intelligent". But last night at the Comedy Festival, local (and recommended) comedian Nick Gibb did this bit:

Edited by Textbook - May 01 2012 at 18:51

Well there is no average bear, it's just a point which is the average of all gathered numbers. The bears must be evenly distributed on either side of this average.

Interesting that my wondering if there were anything else around me that was obviously absurd yet I didn't notice, immediately resulted in my making a post that was obviously absurd without me realising whilst writing it.

Edited by Textbook - May 01 2012 at 19:38

I don't think 'Smarter than the average bear' was ever meant to mean highly intelligent, it was just Yogi Bear's catch phrase; I wouldn't attach any symbolism or importance to it.

I think using any logic or seriousness in this thread is in itself a logical fallacy.

So therefore:
ALL bears are smarter than the average bear

I'm sure Yogi is not a smart bear. I've seen them smarter than that. 

I've interpreted the phrase "smarter than the average bear" to be a joking bit of false modesty, in a way.  Yogi's saying he's smart, and we know he means he thinks he's one of the smartest around, but "smarter than average" is a nice modest, humble way of getting the message across.  So no, I never took it literally - just a bit of rhetoric with a meaning beyond the literal word.

Epignosis wrote: Half of all bears could not be smarter than the average bear.  That's quantitatively impossible, because it would require an odd number of bears.

With an infinite number of bears and a Gaussian distribution of intelligences, exactly half are smarter than average. Remember that 0.9999... (repeating) is in fact equal to 1. 'Tis the nature of infinity. Of course, that assumes a symmetrical distribution; for any skewed distribution, the mean and median are obviously not going to be equal.

Textbook wrote: Well there is no average bear, it's just a point which is the average of all gathered numbers. The bears must be evenly distributed on either side of this average.

The phrase is imprecise on many levels. It could be "more intelligent than the average intelligence of all bears," or it could be "more intelligent than the bear that is most representative of the average of a group of bears." Ultimately, it is rather meaningless as we have no accurate means of quantifying bear intelligence (or better still, we don't even have a good operational definition of "intelligence" at all).

//EDIT:

Textbook wrote: Are they rational?

Yes, Virginia, people are rational.


Edited by Gamemako - May 02 2012 at 01:14

Textbook wrote: "Yogi Bear is smarter than the average bear. So what? So are half of all bears. I guess "smarter than the upper quartile of bears" doesn't have the same ring to it."?

Since people usually mean the mean when the say average, this joke just makes no sense (funny though).

It makes unfounded assumptions about the distribution of the intelligence of bears. He seems content with accepting that a symmetric distribution of intelligence exists so that mean (average) = median (middle). For any sort of skewed distribution, we can't say that half of all bears are smarter than the average.

As an example. take a bear class room of 10 students where you have the following grades: 100,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 ,0 ,0.

The mean would be 10. There would be only one bear smarter than the average. So the statement smarter than the average bear would refer to the top 10% of bears, quite the lofty compliment.

I actually find this to be very plausible. Since bears can't talk, write, or critically think, and since they tend to maul human beings when placed in closed quarters with them, the vast majority would probably receive a zero for their schoolwork. However, given a freak mutation which produces a bear able to talk and empathize with humans, I would expect that bear to do very well in school.

I hereby conclude that "smarter than the average bear" means the top 10% of intelligence.

I say we put the lesser than average bears in labor camps. This will raise the average for normal bears and cause fewer bears to be considered truly intelligent. Also let's keep all the bears that have less money in camps too. Poor bears are more likely to steal 'pickynic' baskets.