Comment by Zenst
4 years ago
Issue I have with averages is they never say how worked out as often they will use a method that suits the outcome they wish. You get different results from mode, medium and mean averages and can cherry pick wich one fits the narrative and use that with the label `average` and it's just accepted by the majority.
Personaly ALL averages should list all three averages for context and clarity as they do offer a greater insight.
Is this actually very common? “average” is the common word for “mean”, I haven’t seen anyone to present median or mode as an average.
That's the problem as mean can be skewed and sure it is often the go to use for averages but can slant the data.
example:
data 1, 2, 2, 2, 10
Mean: 3.4 Median: 2 Mode: 2
Nice online tool to easily work these out https://www.calculator.net/mean-median-mode-range-calculator...
Yes, it can be a problem and I agree more context like median or a full histogram should be more common, but I have never seen anyone claim that the average was 2 in your example.
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Depending on the purpose of finding a central tendency of those numbers, I would argue the mean is correct and the others are skewed...
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It depends on your definition of "very common" of course, but I have come across people using "average" to mean both "typical" and "most common" and "middle of the range" and "my preference" and a whole slew of other things.
Mean, mode, median; they're all summaries. People even in science-adjacent fields are still often used to communicating a summary without showing the dsitribution. If possible, I always ask for both mean and median; it's an indication how off-normal the distribution is.
The mean only has meaning for normal distribution, so it's my least favorite summary, because it assumes the most. Imho the normal dist is assumed way too often.