FRANCIS GALTON, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was a polymath who was particularly fond of counting things. He gathered and analyzed a huge amount of data in his life, and through a process of inquiry and investigation, figured out how reversion to the mean works while counting sweet peas in the late 1800s.1
Reversion to the mean says that an event that is not average will be followed by an event that is closer to the average. Let's return to the example of Charlie, the student introduced in chapter 1. The teacher assigned Charlie to memorize one hundred facts, he learned eighty of them, and the test consisted of regurgitating twenty of the hundred facts that the teacher selected at random. Say Charlie took the ...
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