• plandeka@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      It’s absolutely not. Median is a value in the middle of a sorted set and average is, well, average. In the set of 1, 7, 10: 7 is median and 6 is average.

      • lseif@sopuli.xyz
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        6 months ago

        as @force pointed out, ‘average’ has many meanings (haha). of course a lot of the time, average is used as ‘mean’. but…not always!

      • force@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Idk man looking up a definition for “average” is like

        1. a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number.

        and

        1. Any measure of central tendency, especially any mean, the median, or the mode. [from c. 1735]

        and

        1 a : a single value (such as a mean, mode, or median) that summarizes or represents the general significance of a set of unequal values

        doesn’t look like that dude’s using the word “wrong” to me, a lotta people and mathematicians definitely recall using “average” meaning median

      • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        I agree with this. In my stats class in college, we never conflated average and median. They meant two different things.

      • Tabula_stercore@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Such irony that this comment gets downvoted on a meme about failing education

        Even with a simple, yet very clear example

        • efstajas@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          What’s ironic here is your comment, lol. “Average” can and is absolutely used to say mean or median or any other average that is representative based on the dataset in question. When you ask a statistician to calculate an average of a dataset they probably won’t just go calculate the mean, they’ll think about which value is most appropriate in context.