Average life expectancy can be misleading. I did the maths with my grandfather’s siblings and him, they had an average life expectancy of like 50. However two died before their first birthday, one died shortly after, then the next one to die was like 58, and the rest were 80-90.
Comment on Life Expectancy is the age at which 50% of the of the population is expected to die before.
passepartout@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
From Wikipedia:
Human life expectancy is a statistical measure of the estimate of the average remaining years of life at a given age.
What you described would be the median, not average.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Zorque@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The median is an average. There’s generally three types of average, Mean (what you’re talking about), Median (the one they’re talking about), and Mode (the one rarely talked about).
passepartout@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Sorry for being nitpicky and thanks for naming them all. I just assume the term average is equivalent to mean average in peoples heads. For uneven distributions, like wealth or life expectancy are I assume, it just wouldn’t be a good measurement.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
Yes, when most people say average, they mean mean. Few people I’ve met know the other concepts even exist.
poke@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
US public schools taught me that mean=average and the others were themselves, not that average describes any process to find a “normal” value. Just throwing that out there so people know why the conversation above happens so frequently.
TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Even Excel has a function called “average”, whereas R uses the “mean” function for the same thing. Interestingly, R doesn’t have a function called “average”, because that term is far too ambiguous to statisticians. I think that summarizes pretty well who these tools were made for.
TauZero@mander.xyz 3 weeks ago
The very wiki article quoted says average to mean mean (made explicit later). OP showerthought was calculating life expectancy in a way different than commonly understood. The first nitpick was correct.