we need more medians

People on average have less than two arms and less than two legs.

It's not a joke, it's a hard fact. One of consequences of the mathematical method to calculate the average value: add all of them up and divide by the number of values. This metric might be helpful in some cases, but I believe we are mostly interested not in this abstraction, but in something like the value of "average item". Which is called "median" officially. Take for example the distribution of income, which of these values would be more useful? The sum of all incomes divided by number of people or the income of a person who gets more than 50% of people and less than other 50% of people? I feel that the latter is much more interesting in this case and in many others. Unfortunately almost everyone just uses average value, maybe just because people are used to that.

Well, I hope starting now every time you see someone mentions "on average" you'd remember how many arms and legs a person has on average.

Artemy Tregubenko,

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