I actually kind of enjoyed watching this guy spin himself into a frenzy and conclude that the NYT editors have no basic understanding of anything, based solely on what could have easily just been a typo. Some people really have too much time on their hands.
You posted a comment about your enjoyment of the authors failure, and judged his time management skills due to the fact that he posted his rant about another persons failure on the internet.
The commenter you responded to wasn't being amused by the author's time management skills (or lack thereof). He was amused by the author's emotional state.
Sure, it could have been a typo, or some other minor mistake.
But he's also correct that it's hilariously wrong. Is it really asking too much that something published in the New York Times either have sufficient editing and proofreading to not make an embarrassing typo, or refrain from using terms they don't understand the meaning of, whichever the case may be?
Even if it's only an editorial, it undermines confidence in the paper as a whole. How often do they make similarly silly mistakes on things where I don't know better?
As a teenager, I had an almost exactly similar conversation to this with a line editor of the GED (after looking at a "sample question" on the official GED website). I exchanged a couple of emails and I'm pretty sure she flatly did not understand the concept of a percentile.
Yes, I'm sure that she was the problem and not me. I ran it past my father, a Ph.D. physicist, and he couldn't figure out how to attach a sane interpretation to her remarks either.
Speaking from personal experience, understanding the concept of much of anything is, alas, not really required to pass the GED. So I fear that anyone who can comprehend an advanced concept such as "percentiles" would be wasting their talents on anything involving the GED.
"Some well established federal organizations (ie, NIH) do percentiles backwards. That is, 85 percentile score better than 15%. Maybe that's what's going on...."
I’d really like to see a better explanation of that, or some evidence. It’s possible to order things from “best” to “worst”, with the bottom one percent being the best, but there’s really no way to interpret “below the 85th percentile” as anything other than “among the bottom 85%” without some special, personal, opposites-day definition of “percentile”.
Reality check: The median regular poster on HN is probably in the 95th percentile or better for intelligence, knowledge, and general cluefulness. Hell, the median poster on slashdot is probably well above average.
The bloggers on ScienceBlogs are, in general, competent, intelligent, and well-educated. A faux-folksy disdain for competence plays well for the masses, but politically correct or not there is such thing as actual expertise and I don't know why you're insulting someone for pointing out that a large majority of people are completely unequipped to discuss anything involving even very basic statistics (or any other practical math).
The author is the same person who wrote the much-commented scienceblogs post about why he won't go to his high school reunion. The post and the comments are well worth reading, if you haven't seen them before:
So we could spend all the money and happily report that as a result of huge investments in education half of all low-income students now have above average test scores - a great improvement indeed!
