• _danny@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This is why “average” is a shitty way to measure what values are likely.

    If you have a thousand people who have a thousand dollars, and one person who has a billion dollars, the “average” person has a million dollars.

    • Kirca@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Nah “average” is fine, just using the wrong one here. Means are better for roughly bell shaped data sets. I’m the case above, looking at the median and mode would help understand the data better

      • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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        10 months ago

        i agree that the median should be used here. Maybe its an issue with translation but i was specifically tough that “median” and “average” are two very distinct things that should not be mixed up so the above doesn’t happen.

      • _danny@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Averages are fine if you have a pretty clean dataset. But if you have significant outlier data, like most do, averages can be misleading.

        Mode and median are generally better ways to get look at a “central tendency”