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by jankassens 1847 days ago
I have an above average number of hands: 2 (like most people)

Or in other words, it’s not contradicting if you’re in a 70% group of people who said some answer.

2 comments

The flaw in this survey is that they do not specify what type of average they are referring to.
Average = mean.
> Average = mean.

No, Average is any measure of central tendency, which include all of the median, mode, and the various means (harmonic, geometric, arithmetic,...), as well as some others.

The mode is the most broadly applicable, since (at least if you accept multiple values) it is well-defined on any, even merely categorical, data. The median requires ordinal data, and the various means tend to require at least interval-level measures (some of them require ratio-level measures.)

The arithmetic mean seems to be the most common grade school mathematics “average”, possibly because its the one that does the most to exercise basic arithmetic skills. But its rarely, when distinct from the median and mode, the most useful, and often doesn’t match the intuitive understanding of “average”.

No, it can mean:

Mean, mode or median. These are mathematically distinct figures and they can be extremely different numbers.

The mean, median, and mode are distinct, but mean is the average. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean which says:

> In descriptive statistics, the mean may be confused with the median, mode or mid-range, as any of these may be called an "average" (more formally, a measure of central tendency). The mean of a set of observations is the arithmetic average of the values...

“the mean is the arithmetic average” is nonsense verbiage. “The mean” isn’t even well defined, there are a number of different means.
Aritmentic mean is defined at the top of the linked Wikipedia page to be the average as we know it (sum/count)
The mean is what is often meant by the term but not always. "How to lie with statistics" is a great book and I highly recommend it to anyone still confused by such terms -- or anyone who ever sees, say, ads.

"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies and statistics" -- Mark Twain

The average person has less than 2 hands :)
And just under 1 testicle.
Brilliant :D