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I dont get why this is a joke. My guess is the paper probably reported the mean as having some significance in the context of how participants scored, and the p
by chengiz 11y ago
I dont get why this is a joke. My guess is the paper probably reported the mean as having some significance in the context of how participants scored, and the professor is pointing out that this is misleading. In other words, they should have not reported the mean but the median.
- kazinator 11y agoIt's funny because it's stating the obvious. Yes, arithmetic means are inherently misleading and everyone knows that. They summarize a quantity of information and conceal its important attributes like variance and skew. The 7.7 figure was probably not being used to deliberately mislead. The complainer hadn't in fact fact mislead; they had access to other data from the paper on which to base the complaint. Basically it boils down to "you shouldn't have summarized such and such data using an arithmetic mean because I don't like means; whenever someone uses a mean, they are trying to deceive".
- mikeash 11y agoIf "close to half" scored below the mean, then the mean and median are probably very close together. I think the charitable interpretation would be that some conclusion in the paper hinges on the value of the mean, but that conclusion is not valid when you consider that values are more widely distributed, and the reviewer just stated it poorly.