If I speak of what the “average person on the street” thinks then the word average doesn’t equal “sum/amount”. The word is understand to point to to a quality that’s not defined by a fixed mathematical formula. It takes math training for people to associate the word with the fixed.
In our statistics for bioinformatics class the general idea that they taught us was that it’s usually a bad idea to use the straight arithmetic mean as is, as using it means one measurement errors can throw of your whole data set. Data-cleaning is usually needed to get useful statistics.
When I see the word average I don’t associate it with a specific formula but with ‘we want to know a statistics that represents “the middle” of a data set’. A middle that’s appropriately calculated for the context in question.
In think that’s the sense that most people who are not well educated in math use. They don’t focus on a specific formula.
The notion that the GWWC calculator is firmly aimed at mathematical illiterates has the slight problem that they put a note right there which says “We use equivalised income” with a Wikipedia link.
So you are saying they bothered to explain “equivalised” but didn’t bother to explain “average”?
I think it’s quite obvious which what’s meant with “average”, if you talk about the fact that many people are poor. On the other hand it’s less obvious what’s meant with income.
If I speak of what the “average person on the street” thinks then the word average doesn’t equal “sum/amount”. The word is understand to point to to a quality that’s not defined by a fixed mathematical formula. It takes math training for people to associate the word with the fixed.
In our statistics for bioinformatics class the general idea that they taught us was that it’s usually a bad idea to use the straight arithmetic mean as is, as using it means one measurement errors can throw of your whole data set. Data-cleaning is usually needed to get useful statistics.
When I see the word average I don’t associate it with a specific formula but with ‘we want to know a statistics that represents “the middle” of a data set’. A middle that’s appropriately calculated for the context in question. In think that’s the sense that most people who are not well educated in math use. They don’t focus on a specific formula.
The notion that the GWWC calculator is firmly aimed at mathematical illiterates has the slight problem that they put a note right there which says “We use equivalised income” with a Wikipedia link.
So you are saying they bothered to explain “equivalised” but didn’t bother to explain “average”?
I think it’s quite obvious which what’s meant with “average”, if you talk about the fact that many people are poor. On the other hand it’s less obvious what’s meant with income.
Not to me it isn’t. I would normally take it to mean the total divided by the number of people, not the 50th percentile.