Our politics are broken but I dream of a day when free speech has one more restriction beyond yelling fire in a crowded room or claiming to want to kill the president.
We need to stop people (particularly in politics or the media) from using the concept of average (or as we say in the math business, mean).
The mean is useful when working with various probability distributions, i.e., in restricted technical settings.
In common situations it is almost always misleading. If I am teaching a class and Bill Gates walks in, our mean wealth goes up by many powers of ten. Without mentioning Gates's entrance the mean is entirely misleading.
It is often used by politicians and pundits to intentionally mislead about similar situations such as tax cuts that go primarily to the ultra-rich.
The median is a far better measure. If you sort the data it is the middle value. If Bill Gates walks into my classroom the median wealth would shift by a couple of bucks.
The mean is the average of a set of data; the median is the value of the average datum, completely ignoring extremes.
Whenever the mean is being misused it is because people treat it as the median; I am essentially urging truthfulness by whatever means necessary.
While I think capital punishment is probably too extreme life sentences would be appropriate.
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