• lugal@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      There are different definitions of average and one is median

        • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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          6 months ago

          No, it wasn’t wrong because it didn’t specify which average was meant. If it was “arithmetic average”, it would be wrong.

          • Lemmeenym@lemm.ee
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            6 months ago

            It would still be right. The test results are reported on a normalized curve so all measures of central tendency are all equal.

            • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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              6 months ago

              “I have a ball”
              “So you have a red ball?”
              “No, it’s green”
              “If you don’t specify then the statement needs to hold for all balls to be correct.”

              And by the way: for the given plot, it is correct for all averages

              • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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                6 months ago

                More like

                “Balls are orange”
                “That’s wrong”
                “Ah but basketballs are balls and they are orange, gotcha”
                “No, you just said balls, that’s too generic, if you meant basket balls you should have said basket balls.”

                  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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                    6 months ago

                    Doesn’t matter for the issue at hand, that’s just a question of language relating to the example. A different example:

                    “A set always has a maximal element under the larger-than relation for numbers”
                    “That’s wrong”
                    “Ah but any set of natural numbers has a maximal element, that is also a set, gotcha”
                    “No, you just said set, that’s too generic, if you meant any set of natural numbers you should have said that.”

      • plandeka@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        It’s absolutely not. Median is a value in the middle of a sorted set and average is, well, average. In the set of 1, 7, 10: 7 is median and 6 is average.

        • lseif@sopuli.xyz
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          6 months ago

          as @force pointed out, ‘average’ has many meanings (haha). of course a lot of the time, average is used as ‘mean’. but…not always!

        • force@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Idk man looking up a definition for “average” is like

          1. a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number.

          and

          1. Any measure of central tendency, especially any mean, the median, or the mode. [from c. 1735]

          and

          1 a : a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values

          doesn’t look like that dude’s using the word “wrong” to me, a lotta people and mathematicians definitely recall using “average” meaning median

        • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          I agree with this. In my stats class in college, we never conflated average and median. They meant two different things.

        • Tabula_stercore@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Such irony that this comment gets downvoted on a meme about failing education

          Even with a simple, yet very clear example

          • efstajas@lemmy.world
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            6 months ago

            What’s ironic here is your comment, lol. “Average” can and is absolutely used to say mean or median or any other average that is representative based on the dataset in question. When you ask a statistician to calculate an average of a dataset they probably won’t just go calculate the mean, they’ll think about which value is most appropriate in context.