[HN Gopher] Flaw of Averages (2002)
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Flaw of Averages (2002)
Author : tchalla
Score : 30 points
Date : 2022-01-04 10:15 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hbr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (hbr.org)
| gumby wrote:
| Any average is a reduction of dimensionality.
|
| Strange that people never see it that way. I wonder if they don't
| worry about it in other everyday contexts (e.g. floor plans)?
| wcrossbow wrote:
| The example is not great. I wouldn't blame the use of averages
| there, but rather not realizing that when the cost of
| excess/spoil is not symmetrical the optimal answer in terms of
| minimizing average cost is not going to be the forecasted value
| regardless of how it was obtained.
| kk6mrp wrote:
| One of my favorite quotes from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
| Galaxy:
|
| "Population: None. Although you might see people from time to
| time, they are most likely products of your imagination. Simple
| mathematics tells us that the population of the Universe must be
| zero. Why? Well given that the volume of the universe is infinite
| there must be an infinite number of worlds. But not all of them
| are populated; therefore only a finite number are. Any finite
| number divided by infinity is zero, therefore the average
| population of the Universe is zero, and so the total population
| must be zero."
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > But not all of them are populated; therefore only a finite
| number are.
|
| Isn't this a leap in logic? Not all subsets of an infinite set
| are finite.
| kk6mrp wrote:
| How do you mean that not all subsets of an infinite set are
| finite, or in what cases would this be so?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Ex: {n [?] R | n is odd}
| jcranmer wrote:
| The set of prime integers is a strict subset of the set of
| integers, and yet both are infinite (they have the same
| cardinality even--that is, they are the same size, in one
| sense of 'size').
| feoren wrote:
| Take all the even numbers. That's a subset of all whole
| numbers. Is it a finite set? Clearly not. Both are
| infinite; the population of even numbers is 50%. Sometimes
| infinity/infinity = 0.5.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The universe isn't infinite either. But neither of those is
| the major error with his reasoning.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Douglas Adams wasn't writing a treatise on mathematics...
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| He was not, but the usage of the quote in this context
| implies some relevance to mathematical averaging and it's
| flaws. If the reasoning is not sound, neither is the
| usefulness in this context.
| jw887c wrote:
| My favorite flaw of averages isn't even mentioned in this
| article. It's the aggregation of averages across covariates. The
| more covariates (higher dimensions) your problem has, the less
| likely the population will exist "in the average".
|
| This was explored in a famous study of Air Force pilots and when
| measuring across 10 different dimensions, found that 0 pilots
| were "average" across all 10.
|
| https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
|
| >There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you've designed
| a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you've actually designed it
| to fit no one.
|
| edit: wrong link
| flohofwoe wrote:
| You had the wrong link in your clipboard ;)
|
| It's probably this one?
|
| https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
|
| (PS: this is my favourite pet theory why UX is such a
| trainwreck these days, UIs are designed for an "average user"
| that doesn't exist, driven by "telemetry averages")
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| User interfaces should be designed for the users you _will
| have_ in the long run. In industry and commerce these will be
| expert users.
|
| I spent a large chunk of my life writing software to design
| transformers. The UIs broke all of the naive 'rules' about UI
| design and were crammed full of information, buttons, boxes,
| entry fields, pull down lists, etc.
|
| For the users they were designed for they were very
| productive. For a casual or first time user they were
| impossible to use. But we had no casual users, only experts
| who were in a hurry and would not tolerate having to wade
| through multiple screens to perform some small _what-if_
| exercise. It was like an airliner cockpit, everything as
| close to hand as possible and only the rarely used items on
| other pages.
|
| A frequent request was to enlarge the window so that _more_
| could be fitted in at once, it was much rarer to be asked to
| move something off the main window.
| tenkabuto wrote:
| You linked to the OP by mistake. Please share the article you
| were referring to!
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| that's why you should use guesstimate!
| https://www.getguesstimate.com/
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