What is 3 Standard deviation above the mean ?

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I was watching this compilated YouTube video about work ethic, that some scientists (including Feynman) were speaking. There was this guy saying something along, “I think to have great outcomes, you actually do need to work at like three standard deviation above the mean ”

I only remember basic statistics and simple calculations of mean and standard deviation.

Mean is an average of the dataset.

Standard Deviation is the representation of how close or far are the Datasets from mean.

But I still cannot figure out what he meant.

Note: excuse my English.

In: Mathematics

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Distributions have a characteristic of width. It is unhelpful to use total range as that can be non-representative of the distribution. Instead there is some represetative value of a distribution called deviation. There are an infinite ways to calculate such a value so someone invented a standard way to calculate a deviation. Thus was invented a calculation to produce a characteristic value called standard deviation.

When someone says a value is three sigma above the mean then the value is mean plus sigma three times. Often the distribution is Gaussian or close to it so that description has immediate meaning. Oh that’s more than 98% or the rest or similar.

To be described personally as three sigma above average it’s akin to say you must be a 1 in a thousand talent.

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