Yeah ok my comment was unclear. My quote from the OP isn't false and the "no" in capitals is over the top and wrong. Yet the airline story does show that the m

Yeah ok my comment was unclear. My quote from the OP isn't false and the "no" in capitals is over the top and wrong. Yet the airline story does show that the mean (a bag of means of different factors) can be used -- is often used, wrongly -- to construct an average standard (or ideal) specimen. That specimen is then used as a reference, yet it doesn't exist. Also 1/ The normal distribution without a standard deviation tells us little about where a specimen lies in a given population; 2/ A normal distribution is often assumed when next to nothing is known about the actual distribution, and that's an even bigger problem, especially in social sciences.