Are You Average?

Quote of the day:
"It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence, — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone."
--Joseph Conrad, in Heart of Darkness

Quote of the day no. 2:
“You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.”
--Dave Barry

How many times in an “average” day do we hear about ratings, poll results, rankings and averages? Sometimes it seems to me as if everything is quantified in one way or another.

In a way, we can see this as the cumulative effect of the Enlightenment, or at least one way of interpreting the Enlightenment, which brought into being a new, rational way of seeing the world. Over time, in an effort to be more and more rational, and to understand more and more, we create more and more measurements, and the corresponding rankings and averages.

These measurements and averages serve a very useful purpose. They are a way to digest very large amounts of information. Which may help explain how the numbers can sometimes go wrong.

Averages are not meaningless, but they are abstractions. An average describes a long period of time or a large amount of data, it does not describe any particular individual.

We develop problems when we get so obsessed with averages and rankings that we use them for smaller and smaller phenomena. Example, during a football game when we’re told such things as the last time this team had two turnovers in the second half was last October 29th.

When the late scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with cancer, he was told the average life expectancy for his condition was eight months. He lived for twenty more years, and became fascinated with the concept of “average.”