Comment on Advice on enjoying your life
zeca@lemmy.eco.br 1 year agoneither vague nor a definition
average is the sum of a list of values divided by the size of the list.
No. If you’re going to be pedantic, at least be right.
Average
noun
- 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.
The term average, inherently refers to three different ways to calculate the central value in a data set. What you’re talking about is mean, but it can also mean mode, or median.
Idk, generally people mean the mean by average and the median by median, but I get your point. (But I think the term average salary can be ambiguous for other reasons, not disagreeing there.)
Average salary (that is, the mean) isn’t that good of a metric even if you account for region, industry and so on, because just one outlier can easily skew your entire statistics. Median is much more useful in that regard.
Source: me, someone who writes tools for processing and gathering large amounts of confidential employee data, including salaries of wide range of companies across multiple countries.
youre right, i take it back
Well, if you look at the average salary across the whole world, an overwhelming majority of people doesn’t make enough money to survive, so there’s that
ooh look at you, so smart!
ohoho, thankyou ☺️
thisfro@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
I was under the impression mean and average were used interchangeably, but I’m not a native speaker.
What I meant was mean salary indeed. But median would probably be more adequate.