I have an above average number of hands: 2 (like most people)
Or in other words, it’s not contradicting if you’re in a 70% group of people who said some answer.
Or in other words, it’s not contradicting if you’re in a 70% group of people who said some answer.
Mean, mode or median. These are mathematically distinct figures and they can be extremely different numbers.
> In descriptive statistics, the mean may be confused with the median, mode or mid-range, as any of these may be called an "average" (more formally, a measure of central tendency). The mean of a set of observations is the arithmetic average of the values...
That doesn’t make the word salad sentence used later in the article— “the mean is the arithmetic average”(emphasis added)—make any sense. Were it “the average is the arithmetic mean” it would merely be wrong, but at least make sense (and it would be making the same incorrect point it was being cited to support), but flipping “mean” and “average” so it claims that the former is the “arithmetic” version of the latter goes beyond wrong into being a pile of words that are individually sensible but don’t mean anything, right or wrong, as assembled into a sentence.
"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies and statistics" -- Mark Twain
No, Average is any measure of central tendency, which include all of the median, mode, and the various means (harmonic, geometric, arithmetic,...), as well as some others.
The mode is the most broadly applicable, since (at least if you accept multiple values) it is well-defined on any, even merely categorical, data. The median requires ordinal data, and the various means tend to require at least interval-level measures (some of them require ratio-level measures.)
The arithmetic mean seems to be the most common grade school mathematics “average”, possibly because its the one that does the most to exercise basic arithmetic skills. But its rarely, when distinct from the median and mode, the most useful, and often doesn’t match the intuitive understanding of “average”.