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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

The typical voter didn't take a class in statistics. I know I didn't.

As far as I know, 99.999999..% of the voters are not at the median, so it escapes me why anyone should be concerned with the person in the middle.

Also, what if the number of voters is even? Then there is no median voter, it's just an abstraction.

What is a median in multiple dimensions, anyway? Couldn't it easily be far away from any individual? There was a thing that's probably been on HN multiple times about how virtually nobody is "normal" in, say, five or more characteristics at once.

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Also, I'd like to point out: "Median" is relative to the scale you're plotting against. You can't combine multiple scales and treat them as one. The median voter may be white on the scale of race, may be 50 on the scale of age, may not be college educated on the scale of education, but that doesn't mean half the voting population is white, over 50, and not college educated. If you naively combine the statistics for instance, you wind up with that representing ~26% of voters (.74 * .56 *.63).

Is there a phrase coined for responding to the title of a post, while ignoring all content?

I mean, the title is often the most important part of a post. It's a boiled down version of what the creator wants to present to the world. In this case, it's a very badly boiled down idea.

I'd call that a "median comment."

I feel it's legitimate to criticize the title for what the title is, regardless of the content of the article.

In this case, it was bad enough I refuse to read the article.

Are you saying I would find the article to use "median" appropriately, if I bothered to check?

You might argue that targeting a representative/"median" voter may a bit more effective than targeting the the average/mean voter, who (as you may observe) has one testicle and one breast, very unclear opinions on anything that matters, and is even more unreal than any randomly sampled person

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