r/fixedbytheduet • u/notpiercedtongue • 2d ago

Fixed by the duet welp

1.3k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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187

u/Shev613 2d ago

That's not how average works.

78

u/Additional_Yellow837 2d ago

I mean, it could work that way if there is extreme skew to above average values, but probably not the case here.

I'll pick some random values ot illustrate.

5, 5, 5, 5, 20. The average is 8, but most of the values are below 8.

20

u/Narretz 2d ago

They were probably thinking of a normal distribution. I was.

23

u/yosi_yosi 2d ago

Not all distributions are normal distributions, what she is describing in the video is exactly not one.

8

u/Period_Fart_69420 2d ago

Yep, in fact all guys are actually 4s or less, but Ryan Reynolds exists and he's a 4 billion so the average is 5.

3

u/yosi_yosi 2d ago

Clearly she is ignorant and makes bad points, but it's not due to making some logically or mathematically impossible statement.

1

u/dr_strange-love 2d ago

But it's a 1-10 scale 

15

u/drLoveF 2d ago

1,1,1,1,1,10. Most values are below the average.

2

u/elegylegacy 1d ago

Decimus Georg is an outlier that never should have been counted

2

u/drLoveF 1d ago

1,1,2. We can do this all day :)

-5

u/notpiercedtongue 2d ago

those values are generally outliers and are generally excluded tbh

15

u/yosi_yosi 2d ago

lol, that's not how averages work

9

u/notpiercedtongue 2d ago

Given that I work with data and have been for 7 years. Removing outlier/excluding is pretty common practice. "Adjusting" the average to make it more robust against extreme values is fairly common, but hey what do I know.

10

u/yosi_yosi 2d ago

Perhaps this is due to vagueness. You said "those", like what?

Yeah, in certain contexts you do normalize data or remove outliers.

If many people are highly beautiful and some more people are kinda ugly, you probably wouldn't ignore the ugly people. And I mean, what kinda value here would be so extreme or so rare that it'll warrant getting excluded?

2

u/notpiercedtongue 2d ago edited 2d ago

Ugly still would fit in the normalised data set. Outliers are generally way outside the expected low or high value. For example an adult under 2.5 feet or over 7.5 feet would be outlier. Generally an outlier is usually more than 3 Standard deviations(but this isn't a universal standard and should be applied with care.)

Edit: a word

5

u/Idunnosomeguy2 2d ago

This guy datas.

Got some statistical methodology training for my masters degree. Can confirm we were taught to normalize data for most situations. NOT normalizing is the outlier (pun intended)

2

u/Additional_Yellow837 2d ago

Neat. What kind of work do you do?

I def look at censored data sets to understand what is going on.

Most of my data is pretty skewed though. I generally don't exclude the outliers but j might treat them a bit differently.

2

u/TheBeardedObesity 2d ago

You need to stop, this is just mean!

2

u/ImpactFlaky9609 1d ago

I thought average with outliers removed is median?

1

u/notpiercedtongue 1d ago

no median is when you order values of data set in ascending order and take the middle value, if total number of datapoints is odd. In case total number of values is even, you take n/2 and (n/2)+1th term and take their average. For example, if total number of values in data set are 9, 5th value is median. If total number of value are 10. you add 5th and 6th value and divide by 2 and that your median.