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 agoSorry 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.