How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives

Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by Zenst on Saturday July 02, 2022 @10:14AM (#31959155)

Issue I have with averages is they never say how worked out as often they will use a method that suits the outcome they wish. You get different results from mode, medium and mean averages and can cherry pick wich one fits the narrative and use that with the label `average` and it's just accepted by the majority.

Personaly ALL averages should list all three averages for context and clarity as they do offer a greater insight.

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by stepanhruda on Saturday July 02, 2022 @10:26AM (#31959245)

Is this actually very common? “average” is the common word for “mean”, I haven’t seen anyone to present median or mode as an average.

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by Zenst on Saturday July 02, 2022 @11:05AM (#31959624)

That's the problem as mean can be skewed and sure it is often the go to use for averages but can slant the data.

example:

data 1, 2, 2, 2, 10

Mean: 3.4 Median: 2 Mode: 2

Nice online tool to easily work these out https://www.calculator.net/mean-median-mode-range-calculator...

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by stepanhruda on Saturday July 02, 2022 @11:36AM (#31959911)

Yes, it can be a problem and I agree more context like median or a full histogram should be more common, but I have never seen anyone claim that the average was 2 in your example.

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by texaslonghorn5 on Saturday July 02, 2022 @03:31PM (#31961651)

While the average value was 3.4, I don't think it would be unfair to suggest the average person would have scored a 2 (or whatever the relevant scenario is).

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by kqr on Saturday July 02, 2022 @11:06AM (#31959636)

Depending on the purpose of finding a central tendency of those numbers, I would argue the mean is correct and the others are skewed...

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by Zenst on Saturday July 02, 2022 @03:36PM (#31961692)

I was always bemused that the average family size was 2.4 children as no family fits that average ever. With mode and medium that would not happen.

Of note I have no idea what the average family size is children wise, just going on longstanding data from UK that in itself may be out of date, though does highlight the point.

[EDIT fixed typo]

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by kqr on Saturday July 02, 2022 @04:48PM (#31962236)

Yet if we set up a game with a penalty proportional to the distance between your guess and the true number of children for a family, and you guess the median or mode, you'll be right more often than I (because I will never be right), but you will also continually be losing money to my guess of the mean.

What matters in real life is generally not how often you are correct, but rather by how much you are wrong. What you need to minimise is not your error rate, but the consequences when you are wrong. You are free to make an infinite amount of mistakes, as long as you are sure to make them in such a way that they are comparatively insignificant.

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by Zenst on Saturday July 02, 2022 @05:35PM (#31962671)

> Yet if we set up a game with a penalty proportional to the distance between your guess and the true number of children for a family, and you guess the median or mode, you'll be right more often than I (because I will never be right), but you will also continually be losing money to my guess of the mean.

Not sure were you went there, but the point is that you can overdetail in a way that abstracts from reality.

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by kqr on Saturday July 02, 2022 @11:05AM (#31959628)

It depends on your definition of "very common" of course, but I have come across people using "average" to mean both "typical" and "most common" and "middle of the range" and "my preference" and a whole slew of other things.

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Re:How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives by brnt on Sunday July 03, 2022 @05:19AM (#31966338)

Mean, mode, median; they're all summaries. People even in science-adjacent fields are still often used to communicating a summary without showing the dsitribution. If possible, I always ask for both mean and median; it's an indication how off-normal the distribution is.

The mean only has meaning for normal distribution, so it's my least favorite summary, because it assumes the most. Imho the normal dist is assumed way too often.

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