the median without listing the standard deviation is almost as bad as the mean (for some datasets) I strongly suspect there are very few people between $100,000 and $200,000 because getting a home is that important to staying afloat and the stark racial difference is because one group has more than 50% homeownership and the other a fair bit less.
Things like wealth and income (and alcohol consumption) don’t even have useful mean. They’re monotonically decreasing distributions with most people scoring near 0 and a few people scoring extremely high. It’s more like an exponential distribution than a gaussian.
In the US, mean household wealth is something like 3-4x the median, and if you plug the numbers into the standard deviation formula, you’ll get something close to the mean. Even greater. Maybe that informs a very sophisticated statistician audience, but if you tell the general public ‘standard deviation,’ they think “63% of people are within that of the mean,” and that is only true of Gaussian. For exponential distribution, mean±SD gets approximately all the samples.
the median without listing the standard deviation is almost as bad as the mean (for some datasets) I strongly suspect there are very few people between $100,000 and $200,000
So, you’re saying a standard deviation is useless too? If there’s not a normal distribution, then a standard deviation is probably more pointless than a median
the median without listing the standard deviation is almost as bad as the mean (for some datasets) I strongly suspect there are very few people between $100,000 and $200,000 because getting a home is that important to staying afloat and the stark racial difference is because one group has more than 50% homeownership and the other a fair bit less.
Standard deviation is meaningless for data sets, like wealth distribution, that are not normally distributed.
Wouldn’t it still tell you how concentrated the data are around the mean? Just not as reliably as for a gaussian distribution.
Things like wealth and income (and alcohol consumption) don’t even have useful mean. They’re monotonically decreasing distributions with most people scoring near 0 and a few people scoring extremely high. It’s more like an exponential distribution than a gaussian.
In the US, mean household wealth is something like 3-4x the median, and if you plug the numbers into the standard deviation formula, you’ll get something close to the mean. Even greater. Maybe that informs a very sophisticated statistician audience, but if you tell the general public ‘standard deviation,’ they think “63% of people are within that of the mean,” and that is only true of Gaussian. For exponential distribution, mean±SD gets approximately all the samples.
TYVM!
The fuck are you talking about? It’s still a perfectly useful statistic.
Only the sith deal in absolutes.
So, you’re saying a standard deviation is useless too? If there’s not a normal distribution, then a standard deviation is probably more pointless than a median
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.