The End of Average: How to Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

The Jolly Contrarian’s book review service™ Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Book reviews Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

“Physicians have nothing to do with what is called the law of large numbers, a law which, according to a great mathematician’s expression, is always true in general and false in the particular”.

—Claude Bernard

This is a really good book.

Averagarianism (it is an ugly expression, but averagarism means something else: average utilitarianism, and while close, it is not the same thing) is the legacy of an enlightenment quest to solve complex social and economic problems by “sciencing the shit out of them,” to borrow Mark Watney’s phrase from The Martian. Shit-sciencers in chief were Adolphe Quetelet and our own Mr Quincunx, Francis Galton.

The godfather of averagarianism is Frederick Winslow Taylor.