How the US Air Force Ditched the Average and Saved Lives
The other massive misuse of average I keep hearing is people referring to the life expectancy at the XVIII century. Yeah it was 40 something but not because it was very rare for people to reach 60, but because the average is dragged down by the high infant mortality rate. Once you reached 20, your life expectancy was a bit lower than today, but it was common for people to reach 60.<p>And in general people are really bad at thinking in term of distributions. If you discuss averages or percentiles, people identify to that metric like if it applied to every individual of that distribution. That makes the debate on D&I particularly unproductive.