1479
So much for "progress"
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
1479 points (98.7% liked)
Microblog Memes
10232 readers
280 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If a post is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Be nice. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
True, yeah. I just wanted to be clear about it in case people confused median and mean. I work with high school students who struggle with the difference every year. So, thought maybe some adults who'd been out of school for a while might also not realize the difference.
When talking about stuff like this, large diverse populations and a near continuous variables, a single measure of central tendency is not very informative whichever you choose. They necessarily misrepresent most of the population, quite a lot, just for the sake of what . . . brevity?
That seems lazy to me and makes me think the author doesn't really care too much about the people they're trying to describe.
At least pick a few points across the distribution, and a give a bit more time to understand or explain maybe like 5 or 6 "representatives" out of of however many millions are being summarised by the one statistic.
If the author can't afford to draw a full fledged histogram - at least do a box-and-whiskers.
Maybe that twitter thing is just fucking awful.
Kind of feel like the box and whisker would look something like this, only worse.
Median is (arguably) best if you want to give one value. Of course it's better to give more, like first quartile, median, third quartile. But sometimes brevity is useful too
Brevity is okay if it doesn't spawn comments like some I saw in the rest of this thread when i first read it, which I'm going to paraphrase rather than quote directly: "we're talking about everyone because it's an average"
I dont know how to educate people use, interpret and critique statistics, but I know I'd rather the tweeters were even more brief and just pointed to a source that does a decent job of showing the data and give people a chance to learn numbers can be used summarising what's happening to a population.
If they're just quoting a few numbers to support their opinions they can fuck off for all I care - that's not actually going to help people understand what's going on - or how the data can help them do so. It just creates more hot air. And whatever they pick, there is a counter argument ususally everyone can find a cherry that sounds plausibly representative of far more than it actually is.