Chris Dixon paraphrases a quote from Clay Shirky:
“Bill Gates walks into a bar, suddenly the average wealth of people in the bar goes from thousands to millions. And also now everyone in the bar except Bill has below average wealth. Similarly, contributors to user generated websites like Wikipedia are almost all below average. There are a few people who contribute a ton, and a whole lot of people who contribute very little. This is why it is often very hard for people to conceptualize how these user generated sites work – there is no “average user” to imagine yourself as.”
I find this fascinating, a very wealthy or a very smart person in a group makes everyone statistically below average, even though the average doesn’t really exists.