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aside because everyone who makes that comment seems to get it wrong: 50% of the population has less than the median IQ, not the average!
by rtpg 3y ago
aside because everyone who makes that comment seems to get it wrong: 50% of the population has less than the median IQ, not the average!
- oneshtein 3y agoWe cannot rank all the people and put their IQ into a sorted array to calculate median, so some of us accept loss of precision when we use average numbers.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> because everyone who makes that comment seems to get it wrong: 50% of the population has less than the median IQ, not the average! What's the mistake? It's a normal distribution; the average is equal to the median.
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoThe median itself is a type of an average, too, regardless of the distribution. We have many averages to choose from
- rtpg 3y agoTIL that people talk about the median as a kind of average. Guess I’ll stop making the remark then!
- pi-e-sigma 3y agoMean, median and mode are the three most commonly used averages. Mean itself can be of various types, such as arithmetic, geometric, harmonic and others. Median is a pretty good average because it excludes the extremes. Its 'superiority' compared to the arithmetic mean is can be easily explained by a hypothetical situation where you have 100 people and 99 of them are making $1000 a month while only one making $100000. The arithmetic average salary of this whole group is $1990 a month which is clearly not what most people would intuitively consider as the 'proper' average.
- tomjakubowski 3y agoYou know what they mean.