• givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The only thing worth learning about this is sometimes the average isn’t really useful.

    trump has an absolutely crazy amount of felonies, and we’ve had a relatively small amount of presidents

    • PaleRider@feddit.uk
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      1 year ago

      The problem with averages is more often than not the type of average being used is not specified.

      There can be a vast difference between Mean, Median or Mode.

      • Final Remix@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        And I regularly catch shit for saying the measure of central tendency could be any of those, and that “average” only usually means “arithmetic mean” but could be any number of measures…

        • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          …on the bright side, with that weird article, you now have a very obvious and easy-to-understand example of why it IS effing important to specify what “average” means. ;)

          • Melkath@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            The Central Limits Theorem is what establishes the requirements on a dataset to give a statistical analysis efficacy.

            In general, it is a true blind sampling paired against a control sampling, both of which contain a population of at least 30. In extreme cases like this, the “30/30” rule would not be sufficient to give the mean analysis efficacy.

            If you were me in 2007 learning about statics, you would have been answering test questions like “Cite a condition of the central limits theorem that would invalidate a mean analysis of US Presidents to Felony indictments.”

            That was a long ass time ago, so if I am messing up fine details, feel free to counter. I’m not digging out all my old text books to re-teach myself. I didn’t grow up to be a statistician after all.

            • Kogasa@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              I have a masters in math, I know what the theorem is, I just don’t see how the phrase “Central Limit Theorem” forms a coherent point in this context. What about the theorem?

              • Melkath@kbin.social
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                1 year ago

                It is where you would look to understand why “the average president had 2 felonies” is not a statement that holds efficacy. Maybe.

                Congrats on the tuition paid. Maybe should have taken a few more english/lit/humanities courses. Buffed up that critical thinking.

                • Kogasa@programming.dev
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                  1 year ago

                  That’s not the context. The context is someone pointing out that there are different measures of central tendency that can be referred to as “average.” The response was “Central Limit Theorem”. Not particularly coherent… especially since the central limit theorem has nothing to do with it.

                  I didn’t pay tuition. I earned a stipend and had my tuition waived like most math grad students. But pop off, dipshit.