Right, one of the interesting things about Simpson's paradox is that there's not a uniform right answer: sometimes you care about the overall average, sometimes

Right, one of the interesting things about Simpson's paradox is that there's not a uniform right answer: sometimes you care about the overall average, sometimes you care about the averages of subpopulations. You have to judge that based on the situation. One of the other comments linked [1] which includes Judea Pearl's analysis of Simpson's paradox from a causal inference point of view [2], which lays this out nicely (though maybe not easy to understand--it took me many hours of study to get comfortable with Pearl's causal inference work, even with a strong stats background). [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-simpson/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-simpson/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-simpson/#ConfPearAnalPara https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-simpson/#ConfPear...