What do you think about Statistics?

Metaverseguy: There's so many ways to manipulate data that it's like politicians, magazines, organizations are constantly trying to change facts by using misleading terminology.

calybonos: 86.4% of all statistics are just made up on the spot.

It's a fact!

Metaverseguy: Pretty sure quite a few are. I was reading an article the other day comparing the term "average" and "median" and how reading articles using the former can be misleading, especially when there's a pocket of people that have it very nice and large majority that is always struggling.

Dennae: Using mean (average) instead of median can result in a statistical misrepresentations as it doesn't take into account outliers and extreme values.

For example, if you want to find the average wage of a group of people at a party but one of them is Bill Gates, his wage alone will skew the result and your mean number will not represent the average wage.

If you take the median, it discards the highly skewed wage of Bill and the remaining average wages truly reflects the party.

Of course, it all depends on what question you're asking.
- What is the average income of the group of people at my party?
- What is the income of an average person at my party?

Metaverseguy: Yes the median wage would represent a smaller number than the average. For example, if 3 people made $10,000 per year, $20,000 per year, and $5 billion per year, respectively, the median result would be $20,000 while the average result would be approx 1.6 billion. Of course most institutions are using averages rather than mean and of course you'd have to assume there was some short of integrity by the people reporting the results. There's really nothing stopping people from reporting the average income of onecareer at $400,000 or the average income of another career at $300,000, when in fact both are below $15k per annum. No one is held accountable.