Comment on Life Expectancy is the age at which 50% of the of the population is expected to die before.
Zorque@lemmy.world 5 days agoThe 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 5 days 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 5 days 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 5 days 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 4 days 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 5 days 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.