A car that starts 50% of the time isn't "average". The average new car starts more or less every time. (And if you said 'modal average', I'd say the modal average new car starts every time).
Not everyone can be average. Half of people will be below average.
I might not agree with the point, but I can see that idea that many things just need to be "good enough" (which we might define as "average") and we save our real expertise for the things that really matter.
My point more was that you said it wasn't a widely shared opinion, but to my mind, it is broadly the status quo. Whether that is good or bad is a separate point.
I feel like I can think of lots of situations where society puts in to protect children rather than leaving it to the parents (age ratings on films and games, YouTube Kids, regulations around advertising to children, the whole concept of school, reduced speed limits around playgrounds to give a few examples off the cuff).
Why is beauty a productivity-enhancing attribute for males in non-quantitative subjects? Generally, it is difficult to disentangle the reasons behind why beauty improves productivity (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005). However, relative to other students, attractive men are more successful in peer influence, and are more persistent, a personality trait positively linked to academic outcomes (Dion and Stein, 1978, Alan et al., 2019). In addition, attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks, and are more popular vis-à-vis physically unattractive peers (Feingold, 1992). Importantly, possession of these traits is significantly linked to creativity (Soda et al., 2021). In our setting, the tasks faced by students in non-quantitative subjects, for instance in marketing and supply chain management, are likely to be seen as more ”creative”, and significantly contrast the more traditional book-reading and problem-solving in mathematics and physics courses, the latter presumably perceived as more monotonous. Together with the large use of group assignments in non-quantitative courses, these theoretical results imply that socially skilled individuals are likely to have a comparative advantage in non-quantitative subjects.
"Kovid has stated numerous times that any patches which work towards
python3 compatibility without hurting python2 functionality or
performance would be happily accepted. Oddly enough, no one has ever
taken him up on that, though a number of people have insisted it is
very important that he himself do that work."
"Whereas before, average was expensive in terms of both time and effort, average became cheap."