2-The Problem With Average from The Surplus Population

The Surplus Population

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2-The Problem With Average

49 minutes Posted Dec 5, 2016 at 6:40 am.

The average person has one testicle: https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/27mzxz/the_average_person_has_one_testicle/

Mean: good for bulk properties

Example of media misusing “average” (mean)

The mean cell life is a few years. But, your body does not “renew every cell over seven years.” In fact: “Some cells are made and they're killed off, and replaced very, very regularly, very, very rapidly, blood cells last 120 days for example, others do have to genuinely last you a lifetime.” http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/questions/question/2961/

Infant mortality drags down life expectancy

Actuarial tables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_table

Median:

Average US income $72,641 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States#Mean_household_income

Median US income $54,462 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

Mode: finds the most important groups

Multi-modal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution

Height Distribution: Hmm, wikipedia says “The combined distribution of heights of men and women is sometimes used as an example of a bimodal distribution, but in fact the difference in mean heights of men and women is too small relative to their standard deviations to produce bimodality.” Interesting. Maybe I was wrong to use it as an example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimodal_distribution#General_properties

Amazon wish list of a teacher (softcover vs hardcover): http://gottwurfelt.com/2012/05/16/a-real-life-example-of-a-bimodal-or-trimodal-distribution/

Color spectrum in different languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate

Linguistic relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Life expectancy of cats/dogs/humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy

Malcolm Gladwell TED talk on pasta sauce https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce

Gavin McInnes Battles Tamara Holder: 'You'd Be Much Happier At Home with a Husband and Children' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuWlOhP36LY (This clip is presented under US fair use copyright law)

By the way, he’s also committing the “Ecological fallacy”: “a logical fallacy in the interpretation of statistical data where inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from inference for the group to which those individuals belong.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

Poe’s Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Average Attractiveness from oktrends. Looks like there is some modality to people’s ratings. So I was wrong on that. https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-mathematics-of-beauty/

Also, as I mentioned “women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium” https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/your-looks-and-online-dating/

Average Penis Length: ~5”, Gaussian, Standard deviation 1” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_penis_size#Erect

Women cheat for love (57% feel love for lover compared with 27% for men)

Big Five https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Malcolm Gladwell TED talk on pasta sauce https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce

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Show notes

Thomas and Simone discuss the problems with using averages.

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iTunes: The Surplus Population