Sometimes when I think about it, the college entrance examination is actually quite difficult.
Being a teacher in a college is used to being familiar with this environment and familiar with your own field. Sometimes I don't think it's so good to look at Tsinghua, of course, I don't think it's good when I look at myself, and I don't lick my face to teach at 985. The most interesting thing is that looking at the 985 children every day, I often feel that the current children are not good enough. A generation has the psychological characteristics of a generation, and what rarely changes is the ordering, comparison, and competition between people. That's not good, but who can avoid it.
In fact, the students of 985 are very good. Changing your perspective to that of a parent makes the experience very different. The process of raising a child may be like opening a blind box, and the college entrance examination may be the first step to open. If I remember correctly, the 985 acceptance rate was only 2%, which was for all the students who took the college entrance examination that year, and you must not forget that only half of them could go from junior high school to ordinary high school. In other words, to go to ordinary high school, in fact, it is already on the average. To go to 985, it is one of a hundred, to go to Tsinghua Peking University, it must be one of the thousands, I think I have the privilege of teaching so many students in Tsinghua.
2021 College Entrance Examination 985 Admission Rate (quoted from network data)
I guess my parents' expectations of their grandson must still be stuck in the fantasy of being admitted to Tsinghua Peking University, according to probability, these are not possible. I reminded my family more than once that I had not taken a single exam when I took the college entrance examination, and that I was enrolled in a non-211 university. Don't have too high expectations of your child, it will be counterproductive, or expect him to be better than ordinary people. But my own example is too extreme and too encouraging, always unconsciously reminding people that there is no problem in actually not doing well.
In fact, there is indeed something wrong with not doing well in the exam. On average, after success in the secular sense, a good university will be better. I will always say that I studied for a doctorate at Tsinghua, did a doctorate, stayed in school, and left, and the experience and insight of this will not be understood by those who have not stayed in Tsinghua. In fact, the shortcomings of school appeared as much as I looked for a job, even though I easily got several professorships at 985/211 schools, there were still some schools that stubbornly thought that my first degree was not 985/211 and rejected me.
There is no resentment, I can actually understand that. When people are not understood, choosing an individual in a group with a high average is a rational choice. It's just that a group has extreme values in addition to averages. There are always exceptions in life, and exceptions are magnified and mistaken for universal laws. In essence, it is rational to believe in a probability-based law of averages. To be an extreme, you may have to work many times harder than average. If you can have this effort earlier, maybe you will have been easily admitted to Tsinghua University a long time ago. Everyone is annoyed to hear this kind of broken truth, but no one can believe it only if they really feel the head breaking and bleeding.
It is right to rely on the average. Because psychology will tell you that basically everything in this world is in line with the normal distribution. The so-called normal distribution is a bell curve, you do not need to know its mathematical expression, in short, most people are more concentrated, and a small number of people are distributed at the beginning and end. Its English is actually better understood, called "Normal Distribution", which is actually the meaning of normal. (By the way, the translation of "Normal" to "normal" is a strange translation in itself, just as Normal University also uses the word.) Even stranger than this is that General Psychology would be translated as "general psychology." Not surprisingly, most things in the world are normal.
Standard normal distribution
The normal distribution has its characteristics. It is symmetrical, theoretically there may be as many short as there are tall men, and as many fools as there may be geniuses. Its mean is the highest point, which means that ordinary people are good, not too good and not too bad, most people are like us, and a small number of people are particularly bad, and a small number of people are particularly good. Of course, different normal distributions are also different, because there is still a so-called standard deviation, which simply means that the heap of data is not concentrated. If you've seen Galton's demonstration of the normal distribution, you know that a bunch of enough balls are evenly poured into a series of vertical pipes into the funnel, then the balls must conform to the bell curve of the normal distribution. And if this process is reversed again, the curve will become a little fatter, which is the increase in standard deviation.
So why does nature prefer normal distributions, as evidenced by the central limit theorem. But maybe Galton had a better idea, because the extremes are a regression to the average. He found that the children of tall parents are of course still tall, but they may not be so tall, and the children of short parents may not be as short as their parents, and the children will return to the average. Is it inconceivable that most people will think that two highly educated children should be incredibly smart, in fact, in terms of probability, if his parents are really smart, then he will most likely be less intelligent. What you think is not what you think it is! Why is that? Without going into the past, you just have to think about it, if the tall parents and children are taller, the shorter the parents and children are, this is not a few generations, there are only a group of particularly tall people and a group of particularly short people left in this world, which is obviously unreliable. So you can understand it as a natural way of self-correction.
In daily life, in fact, many places are making decisions with a normal distribution. How do you know your PC boots up to beat 97% of users because there are averages and standard deviations. On average, the proportion of people within one standard deviation is 68.26%, which is replaced by IQ, that is, people with 85-115 are 2/3 of the population, and people with an IQ higher than 145 outside the three standard deviations can be higher than 99.87%, in other words, almost one of the thousands is not running. Its practical averages are good, and if the number is large, it doesn't matter if the extreme values are more. For example, the average IQ of Wuhan University is 120, and there are tens of thousands of people in the school, so even if there are two geniuses in the next year, the average IQ will not change much. The advantage of a cup of water is that it is quite stable.
But I guess you're going to have to ask, and sometimes that doesn't seem to be the case. For example, if you look at the average per capita income of the statistics bureau, you will find that you may not have reached the average, of course, most people have not reached the average. Because social wealth is not normally distributed at all, according to the oft-mentioned saying, the eight richest super-rich people have half of the wealth of human beings combined. At this time, the average is meaningless, the fluctuation of these bits can actually affect the entire distribution, and the average is actually affected by them, and has nothing to do with us ordinary people. What we ordinary people really do is that the average monthly income of 600 million people is only 1,000 yuan, and the average amount of wealth income changes and has nothing to do with us.
Power law distribution
This distribution of wealth in recent decades has been very popular in the scientific community, called the power law distribution, what matthew effect, the long tail theory, the principle of two eight are all about it. A few people account for most of the wealth, a few papers occupy the top citations, a few companies occupy the resources of the industry, and a small number of cities occupy a large number of people. If you have to say quantitatively, it may be two or eight, of course, this is a random rough proportion, 20% of the people occupy 80% of the resources. If you draw it out of a picture, it's a tall head and a long tail. The things in the world are simplified to nothing more than normal distributions and power-law distributions. Normal is regular and stable, while the power law distribution is unpredictable.
Power-law distributions are sometimes called scale-free distributions because there is no mean, standard deviation, and you don't know how to measure it. This mystery also brings uncertainty, because the power law distribution obviously produces extreme values, and the extreme values are very large, which is very disturbing. If natural disasters and plague epidemics are a power law distribution, we will have no way to start, we cannot predict, and we may be the same. If you're an investor, you know that the next project you see follows a power law distribution, but you don't know if it's eight or two.
Sometimes it's not right to think about it, Zhang Yiming and Ma Huateng are actually not a hundred times smarter than me, but why is there a trillion times more wealth than me? It's not fair. An ordinary actor's appearance is actually not much worse than the top stream, but why is the wealth ten thousand times worse? Intuition tells us that the relationship is not linear, that the rich will be richer, that they will make money with money, and that they will even get richer. In fact, sometimes you work much harder than the rich, but you are not at the head of the power law distribution, and the effort seems to become futile. We and the rich have similar demographic variables, height, weight, IQ, appearance, etc. are in line with the normal distribution, but this average-driven result brings a completely different effect, the world is becoming more and more different according to the law of averages, and social classes are thus created.
Society has always been talking about the inner volume, I think in fact, the inner volume is just competition, there is competition anytime and anywhere, but this era will be much more serious, when everyone is talking about the inner volume, it must be this phenomenon is too prominent to be discovered. The above is nothing more than the basic content of my "Psychological Statistics" class, and here I would like to say my point:
The social changes we are experiencing are the process of changing the normal distribution into a power-law distribution.
You can imagine whether the inner volume of all walks of life has become rolled where it was not rolled before, and the place where it was not so rolled has become more volume. It turns out that you could have a cup of tea and a pack of cigarettes, a newspaper and a day's work, but now it is not possible, and 996 is still moralized; is it the capitalists who more ferociously deprive you of your surplus value? Is it that the population is larger and the machines are smarter, resulting in greater competitive pressure? Perhaps, but I always feel that the nature of capital will not change, and the competitive pressure is always there. What really changes is the statistical distribution nature of the industry.
As a university teacher, I deeply feel the existence of the power law distribution. Seriously, you don't have to buy a house in a second- or third-tier city to think that it will rise in price and get rich, or go to the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen to buy a house, because only first-tier cities will become more and more expensive, and houses in other places will not fall, which is a simple inference. You may refute me, no, the house prices in every place have risen before. Yes, I'm talking about change, and now it's changed from normal to a power-law distribution.
The networked world of connections becomes a power-law distribution
Why this change? Just because of the connection.
There is a hypothesis on the normal distribution that probabilities are independent, but how many things in this world are independent? Height can be independent, intelligence can be independent, because this is only related to your parents. But what about other things? The original industries may have been independent, the state was self-sufficient, and the industries operated on their own. But the process of globalization has led to the connection of all industries, the car-making company may be just an assembly plant, and the mobile phone giant may be just a middleman, and the connection leads to the network, leading to non-independence. The first characteristic of complex networks is the power law distribution.
For a simple example, the original university teaching is independent, only students of Wuhan University can listen to the courses of Wuhan University, at most students from several surrounding schools, our industry is independent. Last year's sudden global disaster led to everyone can only take online classes at home, many online classes have become shared, coupled with the impact of MOOCs and other courses, I obviously feel that there is no need for so many teachers, in fact, the whole country is a person to social psychology, students in other schools are listening to it, other teachers are responsible for answering questions, in fact, it is not impossible. When everyone is connected, the distribution of this industry immediately becomes a power law distribution, and few teachers can teach many subjects.
Many companies and enterprises shouted the slogan of the Internet of Everything, and everyone cheered. The feeling I heard was indeed a tightness in the heart, and the interconnection of all things was equivalent to the law of all things changing from normal to power law. The power law distribution also has the characteristics of fractal geometry, that is to say, two out of two and eight and two eight, you think that 20% of people occupy 80% of the wealth, in fact, 20% of these 20% also occupy 80% of this 80%, I will ask you whether the volume is not rolled, how easy it is to do people.
Understanding this matter will actually have an impact on choice, and squeezing into the second of two or eight may really be a choice that needs to be made in life. If you have the opportunity to work as a civil servant in a Beijing ministry or a local government, which is slightly higher, where should you go? If you can stay in Tsinghua as an associate professor, but you can also go to 985 to be a professor, where should you go? In this day and age, it is possible to stay in the head as an option. Of course, staying in the head does not mean being able to occupy the dominant position of the head.
Network theory only tells us that power-law distributions, while not afraid of attacks on long tails, are particularly afraid of attacks on heads. This is like the head of the Internet can actually be easily crushed, because the large number of traffic brings mismatched wealth, and it is easy to drown in saliva because of the large amount of traffic. According to Barabsi, success is an adaptive node. I translate it, to be a very social person, to know a lot of people, to be a star with a big circle, to be a person with traffic, to be so and so on. We have already seen this in various social phenomena, this society has changed, whether good or bad, traffic is king. Wait until the next fragile head fall, and you may be very social and you will be able to stand out, and you don't even need much ability, at least socially more important than that.
Unfortunately, many people, like me, don't like or be good at socializing. What can we do in an infinite volume era where everything becomes a power law distribution? I think that just now Barabassi's so-called success I don't appreciate, that is, success in the secular sense, or directly defined as success is success in the eyes of others. Psychology has always loved its own initiative and choice, the richness of experiences and emotions, rather than the evaluation of the secular sense, otherwise what is the use of the human heart.
This is a bit ridiculous, as if it is talking about a Q-style cognitive disorder that stands and talks without waist pain. If life is really one step wrong, it may indeed be a wrong step, and you can't reach the head of the power law distribution. If you can't get to it, you feel that life is like this, and your calm heart refuses to have another wave. Yes, you lie flat, which is very understandable, and frustrated dogs will learn to be helpless and no longer forage for food if there is hope. People are more likely to see through life helplessly because they can't see the hope of entering two, and to some extent most people have experienced it.
But I still want to say that most of us are actually eight, or eight out of eight, lying flat shows that we are the objects of this world (moral patient), do not want to do something, walking dead, let others slaughter. But at least we have all lived this life, just lying on the chopping board waiting for people to greet is too boring, so we can experience some things, such as the feeling of lying down, and then stand up, experience the feeling of standing up, we can experience the joy of eight in eight, experience the sadness of eight in eight. Well, no one says that everyone has to think that you are successful to have meaning, nor is it two in two to have value, value is not the expectation given by society, not the "should" of parents, it is their own, their own definition.
Forgot to say, there is another major feature of the power law distribution, that is, statistically, it appears in the process of the world's change from disorder to order, the era of the Internet of Everything has created a normal decline and become a power law, and it may be the overlap of the old and new orders, from chaos to order. The great changes that have not occurred in a hundred years are also evidence that we are on the right path. Even so rolled, but hope can still have.
Then again, in fact, the college entrance examination is not difficult, the difficulty is that you can use it as an object of experience. Even if the results are not good, at least unforgettable.