Comment by lbriner
4 years ago
Why does this article not even once mention that average could mean "mean", "median" and/or "mode"? Even the title alludes to one of the biggest problems in the domain and that is that many people don't even realise that there is more than one way to measure an average.
There are plenty of examples of where the mean is not representative of the sample and where mode or median would be more realistic, particularly where some large outliers in a relatively small sample would skew the mean.
Likely the same reason that when someone says "mean", they never bother to specify whether they're referring to the arithmetic mean, the geometric mean, or the harmonic mean. :P
Because for the purposes of the article, it just doesn’t matter. The point is to stop distilling data down to a single point, regardless of what math term you want to use.
I think because the moral of the story is the same, which is the airforce switched to customizable controls to support the range instead of over focusing on a single “average”.
For normal distributions like height, all three should be roughly equal.