Re:Healthy Self-Doubt
by formerly_proven on Saturday July 11, 2020 @11:58AM
(#23803116)
TIL "average" in English can also mean things that aren't "the average" (mean)¹, but I also feel like "news articles" aren't a good way to source the "correct" usage of statistics terms.
¹ This makes "average" a particularly weird "false friend" vocable, because the average recipient might well take it to mean what you think it means, but might also understand it as a very closely related, but subtly different thing.
Re:Healthy Self-Doubt
by nostrebored on Saturday July 11, 2020 @07:54PM
(#23807284)
The fact that you used "the average recipient" to mean typical here really brings it home.
You're wrong, and you can see this by looking at any number of published news articles where more often than not, average is used to mean median. You can see this from the way that we use average to mean typical. 'Typical' features are more likely to be median or mode than arithmetic mean.
'Average' is itself a colloquialism, so the colloquial use is what's important.