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Ask HN: Why is the metric Median less popular than Average?
In almost all real-world instances - From individuals making personal decisions, to inter-governmental groups - whenever one is to try inferring meaning from data, Average seems to be the 'natural' metric of choice. To me, a lot of them could be using Median for better decision-making, but that seems to be no one's first choice.
From a sociological point of view, what is that?
A few points on why I feel Average is the dominant statistic (and counter-points):
* Median requires one to keep an indexed, sorted list. Average can be computed without needing order. _- This seems to be only a positive in computational sense, not real-world-decision-making sense. Governments can wait extra 10 minutes to calculate Median income instead of Average income._
* Average is simple for the Human Brain to make sense of
- compressedgas 4y agoThis reminds me of http://web.archive.org/web/20071224022523/http://shlang.com/writing/mean-delay-considered-harmful.html http://web.archive.org/web/20071224022523/http://shlang.com/...
- mac3n 4y agoAverage can be derived from totals Sometimes that's all the information that's available.
- dsq 4y agoIn an economic sense, using average is a way of obfuscating inequality. Average salary, for example, includes every salaried employee, such as the multi-million dollar a year senior executive, thus giving the mistaken impression that 'regular' salary is higher than it actually is. Median avoids these illusions.
- ggeorgovassilis 4y agoYou can compute things based on the average, eg. samples*average = totals. There is no interesting statistical property I'm aware of that is computed with medians. From a philosophical perspective, the median hides outliers which, however, contribute to the total value of a population.
- simonblack 4y agoOn the other hand, you might have 10 million people starving because they have no money for food, but if you include a billionaire in the group you will find that everybody has plenty of money for food.
- sn9 4y agoYou're overthinking it. It's because most people are mathematically illiterate and most people don't know that there's even a difference between median and average or a reason to use one over the other. Computationally, computing the average vs the median is virtually instant for 99+% of data sets on modern hardware. I can't imagine what a data set would have to look like for it to take an extra 10 minutes to figure out the median.