[OliverJones]

There's an epic rant on this topic here, https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25401 , by Nassim Taleb, one of the 21st century's greatest masters of epic rants.

This Mean Absolute Deviation is a very useful error estimator. Unfortunately it, unlike the standard deviation, requires two passes over a dataset to compute.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_for_calculating_var...