[stonewareslord]

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...

[dragonwriter]

“the mean is the arithmetic average” is nonsense verbiage. “The mean” isn’t even well defined, there are a number of different means.

[stonewareslord]

Aritmentic mean is defined at the top of the linked Wikipedia page to be the average as we know it (sum/count)

[dragonwriter]

“arithmetic mean” is well defined (“the average as we know it” is not a particular sensible phrase to use in a subthread where the point in debate is specifically whether the average refers to one specific thing.)

That doesn’t make the word salad sentence used later in the article— “the mean is the arithmetic average”(emphasis added)—make any sense. Were it “the average is the arithmetic mean” it would merely be wrong, but at least make sense (and it would be making the same incorrect point it was being cited to support), but flipping “mean” and “average” so it claims that the former is the “arithmetic” version of the latter goes beyond wrong into being a pile of words that are individually sensible but don’t mean anything, right or wrong, as assembled into a sentence.

[DoreenMichele]

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