Monday, May 04, 2015
Mean is mean
My blog stats show some kind of bot-swarm happening at one moment. Most hours have about 5 actual reads but this one hour got 400. Obviously not real reads.
If you figured the mean hourly reads from this set of days, you'd get a false hourly number of 8. Running the mean for only the one day would be even worse; you'd get 80. Completely deceptive number.
The median would show somewhere around 5, no matter how you scoped the time intervals. Median isn't bothered by a couple of atypical giants.
Think Gilded Age 2. When you have a few plutocrats and a whole lot of peasants, you get the same kind of picture and the same deceptive reading from a mean. Especially good analogy since most of our plutocrats are bot-swarms of one type or another. Fame created by fame, "wealth" created by QE and stock manipulation. Bot-swarms. DDOS attacks. Numbers moved exclusively within the Correct Circle, monopolizing and overloading the systems of culture and economy, leaving no room for ordinary respect and business.
Using mean instead of median is part of the plutocrat arsenal, causing government mechanisms to miscalculate the overall devastation, and causing media to paint a falsely optimistic picture. See? The average wealth is going up fast! Nothing to worry about!
My blog stats show some kind of bot-swarm happening at one moment. Most hours have about 5 actual reads but this one hour got 400. Obviously not real reads.
If you figured the mean hourly reads from this set of days, you'd get a false hourly number of 8. Running the mean for only the one day would be even worse; you'd get 80. Completely deceptive number.
The median would show somewhere around 5, no matter how you scoped the time intervals. Median isn't bothered by a couple of atypical giants.
Think Gilded Age 2. When you have a few plutocrats and a whole lot of peasants, you get the same kind of picture and the same deceptive reading from a mean. Especially good analogy since most of our plutocrats are bot-swarms of one type or another. Fame created by fame, "wealth" created by QE and stock manipulation. Bot-swarms. DDOS attacks. Numbers moved exclusively within the Correct Circle, monopolizing and overloading the systems of culture and economy, leaving no room for ordinary respect and business.
Using mean instead of median is part of the plutocrat arsenal, causing government mechanisms to miscalculate the overall devastation, and causing media to paint a falsely optimistic picture. See? The average wealth is going up fast! Nothing to worry about!Labels: Blinded by Stats, Metrology
¶ 4:18 AM
