I liked the way the author has structured the book. He went from explaining how the problem came to be and then delved into why it was a problem before providing solutions.

It was fairly interesting to see how Gaussian curves have come to dominate every area of life and I particularly liked the individuality principles that went against the grain. Personally, it was a shift in how I thought about things within this context. (Highly recommend reading atleast the second part of the book, if you don't have time).

I am giving it a 3 because the book touched upon a pet peeve of mine - author describes a solution that supports their theory without discussing any of the rational, reasonable arguments that the other side could have. An all-or-nothing approach isn't something I personally find useful. YMMV.

It makes me CRINGE that so many people are in love with this book. Not because I don't support the cause. Fighting for individuality and appreciating everyone's unique strengths and differences is a noble goal. But one great pitfall in life is defending a strong point with poor arguments, and I am in awe at how many poor arguments Todd Rose was able to string together for this book. I found very few of his arguments compelling, and many examples he gave to support his argument had me almost yelling out loud from frustration. Many times, his "brilliant" individualized solutions were simply to break down metrics into even MORE averages. He disguised this by calling it jagged or by framing it in such a way as to try and evoke sympathy or empathy from the reader.

The final chapters of education reform suggestions (if they can be called that without concrete implementation and evaluation strategies?) were almost laughable. Basically, hire individual tutors for each student and let them work at their own pace and all problems will be solved. He suggests identifying those struggling with reading and simply giving them the label of "slow learner" and supporting their personalized learning style. This strategy, to me, seems no different from the current system. One must still be "slow" compared to others (or, the average). Just because you were able to dedicate resources to the slow learners doesn't make the actual label of "slow learners" the saving grace. Even if it was, like I said, it is not actually diverting from averagarian thinking.

I forced myself to finish this book because I sought out the book to try and change my mindset a little. You can't be open-minded if you ignore everything you disagree with. For me, though, my opinion wasn't changed. From the first fourth of this book onward, I sensed that Rose is a man that is forever bitter about not doing well in the systems of his childhood and blames everything but himself. For example, he argues that it was blasphemy for his school to label him as having anger management issues simply because he scored above average on an anger test. But then he describes throwing a sharp pencil at his father when he was frustrated and getting into numerous fights with other students. This blind contradiction actually made me laugh.

I think I could go on with problems of this book. One part I did like was the cockpit example. Unfortunately, it was about the only logical support to his overall argument in the entire book.

tl;dr Great idea. Very poor execution.

Well, I mostly enjoyed this until the acknowledgements at the end, where the author attributed much of the work to Ogi Ogas, who was the instigator of SurveyFail.

And that just turned me Right Off.

As recommended by Hsiao-Yi

The End of Average showcases the importance of individual approaches to treating, teaching, managing, and training. The book highlights the flaws of apply averages and mean values from statistics to individual people. If you design a "one size fits all" approach then you design an approach that fits no one. This is applicable to clinicians, managers, researchers, and educators. We learn at different paces and the context of a situation impacts our emotions and actions. Our individual characteristics differ but when lumped into an average outcome may be the same. This book provides strategies to avoid the fallacies of ignoring context and individuality. It uses research and case studies to demonstrate that complex characteristics, such as intelligence and personality, cannot be measured by single values or terms. It has reshaped my thinking about how I design treatment plans and lectures. It is a must-read for any clinician.

"According to ergodic theory, you are allowed to use a group of average to make predictions about individuals if two conditions are true: 1) every member of the group will remain the same, and 2) every member of the group will remain the same in the future."
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"The ergodic switch is an intellectual "bait and switch" where the lure of averagarianism dupes people into believing that they are learning something meaningful about an individual by comparing her to an average, when they are really ignoring everything important about her."

The ideas in this book, how society has been built around average measurements in the last centuries and how often no individual is representative of these averages, are extremely important for everybody to be aware of.

This is why companies are looking to personalise their services, why medical services are seeking personalised medicine, why MOOC's are becoming so popular etc.

Using averages without looking into the details can actually end up representing nothing, like comparing a coin toss to the average of coin tosses.

Before you toss the coin you can assume 50/50 head/tails. But if you interpret it as you should get a result of 0.5head and 0.5tail (the average) you will be disappointed when you actually look at the coin you tossed.

I was one of those people who was pretty sure the bell curve more or less applied to everything. For example, I was pretty sure there was an "average" body out there. If you took everyone's dimensions, averaged them together, you'd definitely be able to find tons of that person, more or less, right?

Turns out, nope.

There was this contest decades ago where they took the average of people to create statues of the "average person." They held a contest to find those people in real life... and had a lot of trouble finding them.

... WHAT?

Turns out, even of a lady has average waist and hip measurements, her breasts or arms will be too big or too small. Or her height will be off-average. If you're a woman, you'll totally understand this. It explains why it's nearly impossible to find a well-fitting bra, dress, or pair of jeans. It's not you. It's the system. The variation between all the different dimensions from woman to woman makes the whole process incredibly complicated on the production end.

On a person-to-person level, nobody conforms to the "average" whatsoever -- especially when the thing they're putting together is complicated. Things like body measurements, intelligence, and performance have a lot of components. Two people with "average IQs" can be wildly different. One can be good at math; the other good at verbal. One is a great writer; another has great spatial ability. Etc. Things like the SAT have a zillion sub-categories they're testing, but in the end, it turns into ONE number that doesn't say a whole lot of ANYTHING about the specific person they're grading.

Which I somehow didn't realize on any level. I mean, sure, I SAID things like "IQ is meaningless; there are lots of different ways to excel at life", but deep down, I was pretty sure there was a quantifiable scale of brain quality.

I'm not sure I think that way any more.

Radiant! The research in this is absolutely brilliant commentary about the American obsession with creating an unobtainable average rather than fostering unique greatness. The book itself does get a little long winded at points and of course the teacher in me wishes there was more of a focus on how the higher ed system is grossly miss structured. Overall very fascinating if you like a good nonfiction.

As with most books like this, a ten minute TED talk would suffice. But, since we were reading it for a faculty book study, I plugged through the whole thing.

Rose's point is compelling: by trying to adapt to an average person, we essentially make sure no one fits the mold. This has obvious implications for education, with grade-level concerns, questions about age appropriateness, IEP qualifications, and those darn letter grades that are due from teachers next Wednesday at 11 p.m.

However, Rose spends 188 pages avoiding proposing a solution for K-12 education and, when he does, his advice is "textbooks designed 'to the edges.'" What does that look like? How does a printed textbook adapt sentence structures to different readers' needs? Is all of the content the same? Is the class-of-students-with-one-teacher model also antiquated? (Rose might think so, even if he doesn't outright say it. He's a big fan of Khan academy and digitally available, fully self-paced learning.) Rose did a great job describing how the system is broken and why it's a problem, but now I feel sad and powerless and like I'm failing my students by not restructuring all of society.

On the bright side, though, I learned a strange amount about the Morning Star tomato company!