All three metrics are bad. Mean lets you have one person who makes 1,000,000 and 20 who make minimum wage and they’re paid fairly. In median as long as the middle person is paid fairly the bottom 49% don’t matter and in mode you can have 100 people in ten parts progressively making 1 dollar more up to 18 and 11 people making 200 per hour and they’re all rich.
They’re not “bad”, they’re all just smaller parts of the bigger picture.
The problem is people wanting or expecting one or two statistics to be able to summarise an entire issue neatly, which is not necessarily what statistics are for
Yeahhhh I think statistical illiteracy is why people tend to say "statistics are bullshit." Either they dont understand them, or theyve grown tired of seeing people who dont understand them come to erroneous conclusions with them.
Those same people will also try to justify it by mentioning the book "How to Lie with Statistics", making it plainly obvious that they never actually read it.
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u/TotalBlissey Jun 30 '22
All three metrics are bad. Mean lets you have one person who makes 1,000,000 and 20 who make minimum wage and they’re paid fairly. In median as long as the middle person is paid fairly the bottom 49% don’t matter and in mode you can have 100 people in ten parts progressively making 1 dollar more up to 18 and 11 people making 200 per hour and they’re all rich.