4 ms·
I haven't seen the source. But I am guessing the anger is temperature is a number that doesn't make since to blindly add. Example: 2 boiling pots are not 200 de
by jmount 5y ago
I haven't seen the source. But I am guessing the anger is temperature is a number that doesn't make since to blindly add. Example: 2 boiling pots are not 200 degrees C. Or more technically temperature is the mean molecular kinetic energy, an average not a total.
- mattkrause 5y agoThe really frustrating part is that a trivial edit--ask for the average temperature instead--could make it into a sensible question.
- vlovich123 5y agoAn average of an average does not yield any number that has any useful definition.
- mattkrause 5y agoCould you elaborate? The average (over 24 hours) temperature yesterday was 25˚C. You could certainly ask how that compares to other August 29ths in different years. This even has a name ("grand mean"), so I'm surprised that someone thinks it's never useful.
- vlovich123 5y agoI may have overstated slightly. The mean of means is equivalent to the overall mean iff > the subsamples have the same number of data points It's unlikely to be useful in any other situation. Certainly not for averaging the temperature of a galaxy.
- mattkrause 5y agoYes, that's obviously how the math works out. Both the overall mean and mean-of-means have sensible interpretations though. Suppose you observe a random sample of stars and find their temperatures to be 6000, 6250, 6750, and 7000C. The best possible guess[0] for the temperature of a new star drawn from that population is 6500C. The average temperature of all the starstuff may be different if one star is larger than another, but that's an answer to a slightly different question. In fact, I would argue that the mean-of-means is often a more appropriate summary statistic than the overall mean of the observations when there are repeated measurements. [0] Under L2 loss, with no prior, etc etc