Comment by mattkrause

Rank-transforms are pretty common: they show up in a lot of non-parametric hypothesis tests, for example.

The neat thing about ranks is that, in aggregate, they're very robust. You can make an estimate of the mean arbitrarily bad by tweaking a single data point: just send it towards +/- infinity and the mean will follow. The median, on the other hand, is barely affected by that sort of shenanigans.