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A nitpick, but "average" can refer to any sort of central tendency, whether it's the arithmetic mean, the harmonic mean, the median, the trimean or anything els
by stdbrouw 10y ago
A nitpick, but "average" can refer to any sort of central tendency, whether it's the arithmetic mean, the harmonic mean, the median, the trimean or anything else.
- jdale27 10y agoYou may be technically correct regarding the common usage of the word "average". However, "average" is most commonly used to refer to the arithmetic mean. Using the word "average" to refer to the median is bad writing, and furthermore, using the arithmetic mean instead of the median to represent the "central tendency" of a distribution that is highly skewed and/or has extreme outliers is bad statistics. Journalists who are going to write about these things should know better.
- stdbrouw 10y ago> Using the word "average" to refer to the median is bad writing It can be, but not necessarily. Otherwise, you'd have to say that the average Joe has 1.9 legs. Median or mode are much more natural in that context. Other than that, not trying to make any particular point, of course you're right that using the arithmetic mean is a lousy practice for many kinds of data.