Averages are bad whenever the distribution is not normal, which tends to be the case for a lot of social/real world scenarios.
But everyone knows what the average means. It's useful to push certain narratives to a mass population that's poorly educated in statistics.
I really wish they did more to teach statistics in high school, it feels like this is a genuine useful application of a lot of mathematical concepts that are taught throughout the schooling years, but barely given any proper attention in school. I think someone that's in their last ~2 years of high school has enough mathematical background to learn and understand statistics very well. And god, this would be immensely helpful in getting a more educated public.
Seriously, the times I've seen politicians use bullshit graphs to misrepresent data, use subsets of data to push for a certain narrative (78% of people believe A [when in reality it's 78% of a sub-sample] so from the total it might be a 20% or whatever less impressive number). Or just plainly using average to describe a population that doesn't have a normal distribution.
But everyone knows what the average means. It's useful to push certain narratives to a mass population that's poorly educated in statistics.
I really wish they did more to teach statistics in high school, it feels like this is a genuine useful application of a lot of mathematical concepts that are taught throughout the schooling years, but barely given any proper attention in school. I think someone that's in their last ~2 years of high school has enough mathematical background to learn and understand statistics very well. And god, this would be immensely helpful in getting a more educated public.
Seriously, the times I've seen politicians use bullshit graphs to misrepresent data, use subsets of data to push for a certain narrative (78% of people believe A [when in reality it's 78% of a sub-sample] so from the total it might be a 20% or whatever less impressive number). Or just plainly using average to describe a population that doesn't have a normal distribution.
:(