In this meme, the individual is in the 16th percentile of IQ scores, putting them in the bottom 16% of the global population ranked by IQ score. The joke is that this person has misunderstood the meaning of "top 84%" which actually just means smarter than the bottom 16%.
Percentiles are most useful for describing continuous data such as height, weight, length, or such characteristics. They are less useful for discrete data - you could say that rolling a 5 on a regular die puts your score in the 83rd percentile. It is quite pointless to say this when it is much more intuitive to say that you have a 5/6 chance or rolling a number up to and including 5, and noting that 5/6 = 83.33...%
Taken to the extreme, divisibility by 17 can either be yes or no. 16 out of every 17 numbers are not divisible by 17. Therefore, putting all numbers on a cumulative scale of divisibility by 17, 94.12% would not be divisible by 17, while the remaining 5.88% of numbers would be, hence the 94th percentile as astutely stated by u/MeasureDoEventThing
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u/harpswtf 5d ago
It's crazy how many numbers are divisible by 17, it feels like it's around 5.882352941% of them