HACKER Q&A
📣 butterNaN

Why is the metric Median less popular than Average?


In almost all real-world instances - From individuals making personal decisions, to inter-governmental groups - whenever one is to try inferring meaning from data, Average seems to be the 'natural' metric of choice. To me, a lot of them could be using Median for better decision-making, but that seems to be no one's first choice.

From a sociological point of view, what is that?

A few points on why I feel Average is the dominant statistic (and counter-points):

* Median requires one to keep an indexed, sorted list. Average can be computed without needing order. _- This seems to be only a positive in computational sense, not real-world-decision-making sense. Governments can wait extra 10 minutes to calculate Median income instead of Average income._

* Average is simple for the Human Brain to make sense of

  👤 ggeorgovassilis Accepted Answer ✓
You can compute things based on the average, eg. samples*average = totals. There is no interesting statistical property I'm aware of that is computed with medians.

From a philosophical perspective, the median hides outliers which, however, contribute to the total value of a population.

👤 sn9
You're overthinking it.

It's because most people are mathematically illiterate and most people don't know that there's even a difference between median and average or a reason to use one over the other.

Computationally, computing the average vs the median is virtually instant for 99+% of data sets on modern hardware. I can't imagine what a data set would have to look like for it to take an extra 10 minutes to figure out the median.

👤 dsq
In an economic sense, using average is a way of obfuscating inequality. Average salary, for example, includes every salaried employee, such as the multi-million dollar a year senior executive, thus giving the mistaken impression that 'regular' salary is higher than it actually is. Median avoids these illusions.
👤 compressedgas
This reminds me of

http://web.archive.org/web/20071224022523/http://shlang.com/...

👤 mac3n
Average can be derived from totals Sometimes that's all the information that's available.