According to dictionary.com, an outlier is "a person, thing, or part situated away from a main or related body". The definition of an outlier is largely open to interpretation and can have both positive and negative connotations. For example, upon hearing the word "outlier", I almost immediately have a flashback to the labs in my AP Biology course in high school. After the completion of every lab excercise, everyone would record their results on the whiteboard. From this information, our teacher would construct a graph on microsoft excel and display on the television screen. And it almost never failed; our lab group would be the outliers. If everyone recorded results between 1 and 2 cm, we could somehow manage to get a reading of 5 cm. And then our teacher would go to great lengths to try to find the source of the error with us. Sometimes, we just wouldn't continue with the course material until the error was found. In this situation, being the outliers helped us eventually improve our techniques in the lab setting to minimize errors in the future. As the end of the school year approached, our techniques in the lab improved to a point where were no longer the outliers. In this situation, the word outlier has a negative connotation, which eventually leads to a positive outcome.
In Outliers, Malcom Gladwell evinces to his audience the obvious benefits of being an outlier with the examples of people like Bill Joy, who is directly or indirectly responsible for many of the computer programs used today. Gladwell also mentions the town of Roseta, in which the people are far healthier than the majority of America. This goes to show that an outlier is simply a person, place, or thing that is unique or set apart from a main group. The implications of the previous statement depend solely on how society interprets it.
Your example is pretty appropriate for the situation. I have the same ideas about the definition of an outlier and how you cannot just make one definition for every person. The most important part of the definition of an outlier ios the fact that there is no solid definition which, like you said, leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
ReplyDeleteMy teacher did the same thing in my AP bio class when we did labs.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, the last line of your post about how everything depends on societies interpretation is kinda what I was getting to about there not being outliers. Because everyone perceives things, and people, differently, we can all in some way or another be seen as an outlier. And because outliers tend to be something that is different, if we are all different, we are all the same. I'm not sure if I made any sense, but that's about the best way I can explain it.
I like how you incorporated the negative feelings sometimes associated with being an outlier. I think a lot of times this is the case.
I like how you gave examples of outliers for being both bad and good. I agree wholeheartedly. I like how you mentioned that outlier is a word open for interpretation; it's like beauty, in the eye of the beholder.
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