Don’t be fooled by people using the word “average,” particularly when they talk about income. If you’ve ever come across the “average” salary in your state or nation and wondered why you don’t make that much, it’s because some outliers ruin the math by making obscene amounts of money, while there are no outliers in the other direction, since you can’t have “income” at less than zero. This is only one of several comics illustrating how statistics can be manipulated to say anything you want at Math With Bad Drawings. -via Digg
You can't make statistics say anything you want. Problems happen because, either the speaker got the math wrong (on purpose or not), or the listener is getting the math wrong. Learning some basic statistics eliminates the latter, leaving you with just lies and computation mistakes to worry about.
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