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> In general, the median conveys remarkably little information. It's great at showing the center, but it gives zero indication of anything else. The median als

> In general, the median conveys remarkably little information. It's great at showing the center, but it gives zero indication of anything else. The median also has zero ability to make me coffee in the mornings, but I don't think I can hold that against it. I can imagine situations where getting people to track or listen to even a single number is tough and using the mean as a measure of both central tendency and the stability of the distribution over time might be the least worst option. But is that really a common problem? Have you often encountered situations where it was impossible to communicate something like "the typical customer buys five widgets but more than 1 in 4 of our customers only buy one" because it contains two statistics and management insists on being briefed with just one?

somestag 10y ago
Clearly the best approach is to directly answer the question at hand with the most relevant numbers/statistics available. I'm all for that. I'd argue you'd still want to use the mean more than the median, but it's not really important at that point because you're painting the most complete picture you can. There are times that, for whatever reason, someone is only presenting one statistic. News headlines are a big one. In this case, you clearly want to pick the "best" statistic available. There are people who think that the median is categorically better than the mean and dispense advice as such. (You can find them saying things like "the mean is worthless, the median would be much better" in the comments of discussion boards.) That's not what this article did, but the author did imply (in its title and language, if nothing else) that the median is better than the mean without offering any sort of weighing mechanism for which to choose. That's what I'm responding to, because it perpetuates the median > mean myth that's prevalent among certain groups of people.

somestag 10y ago

Clearly the best approach is to directly answer the question at hand with the most relevant numbers/statistics available. I'm all for that. I'd argue you'd still want to use the mean more than the median, but it's not really important at that point because you're painting the most complete picture you can. There are times that, for whatever reason, someone is only presenting one statistic. News headlines are a big one. In this case, you clearly want to pick the "best" statistic available. There are people who think that the median is categorically better than the mean and dispense advice as such. (You can find them saying things like "the mean is worthless, the median would be much better" in the comments of discussion boards.) That's not what this article did, but the author did imply (in its title and language, if nothing else) that the median is better than the mean without offering any sort of weighing mechanism for which to choose. That's what I'm responding to, because it perpetuates the median > mean myth that's prevalent among certain groups of people.