The wealth distributions are so called “normal” statistical distributions (basically a peak in the middle with a low on each side), so most people are at and around the central peak whilst only a few people are at the extremes, and in these the median which is at the top of the peak tells you the most common situation. Meanwhile for wealtht the mean is just mathematically the total wealth divided by the number of people.
In other words, the median tells you the most common situation, whilst the mean tells you how much is the total wealth divided by the total number of people (for wealth a purelly mathematical value which doesn’t really represent any human situation).
(Edit: changed maths below for clarity)
An example - if there are 10 people with 1 chicken each and 1 person with 100 chickens
The mean says that each person has 10 chickens ( (10*1 + 100) / 11), so 10x the chickens than the reality for 10 out of 11 people.
The median says that each person has 1 chicken, as that’s how many chickens the person in the middle of a list ordered by number of chickens has.
Going back to wealth, one stupidly rich person and a lot of very poor people produces a mean were they’re all supposedly middle-class - which is not at all representative of the wealth of most people - whilst it produces a median which says the most common situation is to be poor.
This extreme example, by the way, is very close to the situation in the US - most people in America are (according to some OECD data somebody posted here a couple of days ago) poorer than for example the Portuguese (pretty much the tail of Europe), but the mean of wealth for America says that per-capita Americans are almost 3x as wealthy than the Portuguese, and the reason for this is that America is WAY more unequal than Portugal, so whilst most Americans are poorer than most Portuguese, the small fraction at the top which is the upper-middle class in America is much better off that the same in Portugal and a handful of Americans at the very top are incredibly more wealthy than the wealthiest Portuguese.
Thank you very much for going out your way to do this explanation. It’s something that’s bugged me for a while and I’ve not found a good explanation behind it.
I’m assuming based on this then the median often offers a better “reasonable” person in a given demographic and includes everyone, over mean with top and bottom excluded.
And obviously from your explanation median makes wealth comparisons between nations more accurate.
Well, median, mean and mode are all imperfect, but mean is by far the most imperfect because it ignores the distribution of values per data point (so in this case the distribution of wealth per individual) whilst median and mode do not and so tend to fall towards an indicative value (i.e. wealth level) around were the majority of cases are.
By the way, I made a mistake in my previous post and wealth is not a “normal distribution”, though it is similar.
A normal distribution looks like this but the wealth distribution is not balanced on both sides since the upper tail of cases (i.e. the richer) is theoretically unbound, whilst the lower tail of cases is either bound (at $0 if debt is not included) or only goes up to a certain point if debt is included (basically only up to the point were people will lend money to other people).
Normal distributions (so, the Mathematical, perfectly balanced ones) have amongst other things the property that mean = median = mode so if wealth was a perfect normal statistical distribution then using the mean would not be a problem.
Can you please change this to 11 people with 100 chickens so I can just take the 6th persons chicken count instead of averaging it with the 5ths person chicken count to determine the median?
We should all “treat others the same as we want to be treated ourselves” and I got the impression that the way I had done it got on your nerves, same as some things a bit “out of place” get on mine.
There’s a great comedian complaining she didn’t initially get her autism diagnosis because when the psychologist asked her, “Do the tags on the back of your shirt bother you?” she answered simply, “No.” When she found out that not having sensory issues was what denied her the diagnosis, she snapped, “Of course the tags don’t bother me–I have a system!”
I’m coming to grips with the fact that I have a lot–but not all–of the traits of autism. I realize that as an adult, I probably have at least a few more than I’m immediately aware because I’ve been subconsciously avoiding situations that trigger my autism, so this week, this week I’m letting my freak flag fly to see what’s beneath the mask.
My traits pretty much match all the entries in the Giftedness circle. My IQ also makes more likely I’m in there (though very high IQ it’s not a requirement).
It would explain having some traits found in people with Autism and some traits found in people with ADHD whilst not actually having enough to be diagnosed as either.
I’ve came to terms with being “quirky” in how I think and like things more than a decade ago (well before I found “Giftedness” exists as kind of uncommon way of mentally operating, though I was deemed “gifted” as a child in terms of mental capacity rather than an explanation for my behavioral traits) and don’t real think it’s a bad thing: it is as it is and I’m not going to try and change myself to be more like the average person (especially since I feel the average human being is less than impressive).
I mention this because maybe your situation is the same or similar.
Yes, it’s similar, except that I’m not particularly intelligent, except maybe when it comes to language.
My big deficit is social skills, but mostly because I find people incredibly boring and I don’t have any interest in playing the social games that make people comfortable; however, I don’t run the board on social autistic traits, because I can read faces and predict how people will respond pretty easily. I don’t “mask” exactly, so much as “turn it on and off.” That is to say, I can naturally follow a normal conversation and social interaction the normal way, more or less, and I can do so naturally, without having to follow abstract rules I learned from a reddit post, but it is exhausting. That said one trait I can’t turn off is my need to be honest.
My work history has really suffered. And it pisses me off a bit that I can’t get any benefits or accomodations for it without a dx. The reason autistic people suffer unemployment and underemployment is exactly the social issues I share with them, and I don´t know how the tag on the back of my shirt not bothering me makes me less deserving of accomodations when it is not the bother of a tag on the back of my shirt that’s making work difficult.
I guess the problem for society is if we treated everyone to make them comfortable, that would mean that
???
I fucking hate it here.
But the one thing I have learned is to say “fuck off” to the mental health system, because I could get a stack of OTHER diagnsoses at the drop of a hat. But the core of the problem, I realize, has less to do with me, and more to do with not fitting in. I mean, that is a problem FOR me, but I am not the problem.
Also: I keep seeing AuDHD bandied about–which I assume is a portmanteau of Autism and ADHD. Have you looked into that?
Overall, I find the whole diagnostic system kind of flawed–or, if not flawed, then of limited utility… but my thoughts on that here:
IMHO ultimately the problem is down to the natural human need to put things in labelled boxes (“Autism”, “ADHD”) to simplify a complex world into a simpler enough representation that it fits most people’s mental capabilities and they can understand it - something which ends up causing problems for everybody significantly away from the norm in anything which is a range or a spectrum (for example, I suspect the problems around sexual orientation and transsexualism derive from this) - and people’s emotional need to feel comfortable which is challenged when they interact with people who don’t look like or behave within a certain common range of appearance or behavior people are familiar with - something which gets solved with familiarity, but that does mean that the more uncommon somebody’s pattern of behavior is or the more people like that tend to refrain from social contact, the less people in general out there will be familiar and thus comfortable with it.
A large part of the problem with these is that they’re emotional and/or subconscious, so to overcome such human tendencies in oneself one needs to be at least somewhat intelligent, know about this kind of thing, actually have enough empathy to want to do it for the other person on the other side AND have enough self-awareness to spot in themselves such tendency, a combination of character traits which is at best uncommon.
The wealth distributions are so called “normal” statistical distributions (basically a peak in the middle with a low on each side), so most people are at and around the central peak whilst only a few people are at the extremes, and in these the median which is at the top of the peak tells you the most common situation. Meanwhile for wealtht the mean is just mathematically the total wealth divided by the number of people.
In other words, the median tells you the most common situation, whilst the mean tells you how much is the total wealth divided by the total number of people (for wealth a purelly mathematical value which doesn’t really represent any human situation).
(Edit: changed maths below for clarity)
An example - if there are 10 people with 1 chicken each and 1 person with 100 chickens
Going back to wealth, one stupidly rich person and a lot of very poor people produces a mean were they’re all supposedly middle-class - which is not at all representative of the wealth of most people - whilst it produces a median which says the most common situation is to be poor.
This extreme example, by the way, is very close to the situation in the US - most people in America are (according to some OECD data somebody posted here a couple of days ago) poorer than for example the Portuguese (pretty much the tail of Europe), but the mean of wealth for America says that per-capita Americans are almost 3x as wealthy than the Portuguese, and the reason for this is that America is WAY more unequal than Portugal, so whilst most Americans are poorer than most Portuguese, the small fraction at the top which is the upper-middle class in America is much better off that the same in Portugal and a handful of Americans at the very top are incredibly more wealthy than the wealthiest Portuguese.
Thank you very much for going out your way to do this explanation. It’s something that’s bugged me for a while and I’ve not found a good explanation behind it.
I’m assuming based on this then the median often offers a better “reasonable” person in a given demographic and includes everyone, over mean with top and bottom excluded.
And obviously from your explanation median makes wealth comparisons between nations more accurate.
Well, median, mean and mode are all imperfect, but mean is by far the most imperfect because it ignores the distribution of values per data point (so in this case the distribution of wealth per individual) whilst median and mode do not and so tend to fall towards an indicative value (i.e. wealth level) around were the majority of cases are.
By the way, I made a mistake in my previous post and wealth is not a “normal distribution”, though it is similar.
A normal distribution looks like this but the wealth distribution is not balanced on both sides since the upper tail of cases (i.e. the richer) is theoretically unbound, whilst the lower tail of cases is either bound (at $0 if debt is not included) or only goes up to a certain point if debt is included (basically only up to the point were people will lend money to other people).
Normal distributions (so, the Mathematical, perfectly balanced ones) have amongst other things the property that mean = median = mode so if wealth was a perfect normal statistical distribution then using the mean would not be a problem.
Can you please change this to 11 people with 100 chickens so I can just take the 6th persons chicken count instead of averaging it with the 5ths person chicken count to determine the median?
Sure.
I appreciate you.
We should all “treat others the same as we want to be treated ourselves” and I got the impression that the way I had done it got on your nerves, same as some things a bit “out of place” get on mine.
There’s a great comedian complaining she didn’t initially get her autism diagnosis because when the psychologist asked her, “Do the tags on the back of your shirt bother you?” she answered simply, “No.” When she found out that not having sensory issues was what denied her the diagnosis, she snapped, “Of course the tags don’t bother me–I have a system!”
I’m coming to grips with the fact that I have a lot–but not all–of the traits of autism. I realize that as an adult, I probably have at least a few more than I’m immediately aware because I’ve been subconsciously avoiding situations that trigger my autism, so this week, this week I’m letting my freak flag fly to see what’s beneath the mask.
Well, I did attend a psychotherapist for some years and when I said that some of my friends thought I had Autism, she said I did NOT have Autism.
Further, I don’t have most of the traits of ADHD, though for example I bore easily unless I constantly have something to occupy myself with.
A couple of years ago I saw this diagram
My traits pretty much match all the entries in the Giftedness circle. My IQ also makes more likely I’m in there (though very high IQ it’s not a requirement).
It would explain having some traits found in people with Autism and some traits found in people with ADHD whilst not actually having enough to be diagnosed as either.
I’ve came to terms with being “quirky” in how I think and like things more than a decade ago (well before I found “Giftedness” exists as kind of uncommon way of mentally operating, though I was deemed “gifted” as a child in terms of mental capacity rather than an explanation for my behavioral traits) and don’t real think it’s a bad thing: it is as it is and I’m not going to try and change myself to be more like the average person (especially since I feel the average human being is less than impressive).
I mention this because maybe your situation is the same or similar.
Yes, it’s similar, except that I’m not particularly intelligent, except maybe when it comes to language.
My big deficit is social skills, but mostly because I find people incredibly boring and I don’t have any interest in playing the social games that make people comfortable; however, I don’t run the board on social autistic traits, because I can read faces and predict how people will respond pretty easily. I don’t “mask” exactly, so much as “turn it on and off.” That is to say, I can naturally follow a normal conversation and social interaction the normal way, more or less, and I can do so naturally, without having to follow abstract rules I learned from a reddit post, but it is exhausting. That said one trait I can’t turn off is my need to be honest.
My work history has really suffered. And it pisses me off a bit that I can’t get any benefits or accomodations for it without a dx. The reason autistic people suffer unemployment and underemployment is exactly the social issues I share with them, and I don´t know how the tag on the back of my shirt not bothering me makes me less deserving of accomodations when it is not the bother of a tag on the back of my shirt that’s making work difficult.
I guess the problem for society is if we treated everyone to make them comfortable, that would mean that
???
I fucking hate it here.
But the one thing I have learned is to say “fuck off” to the mental health system, because I could get a stack of OTHER diagnsoses at the drop of a hat. But the core of the problem, I realize, has less to do with me, and more to do with not fitting in. I mean, that is a problem FOR me, but I am not the problem.
Also: I keep seeing AuDHD bandied about–which I assume is a portmanteau of Autism and ADHD. Have you looked into that?
Overall, I find the whole diagnostic system kind of flawed–or, if not flawed, then of limited utility… but my thoughts on that here:
https://sh.itjust.works/post/62865308
IMHO ultimately the problem is down to the natural human need to put things in labelled boxes (“Autism”, “ADHD”) to simplify a complex world into a simpler enough representation that it fits most people’s mental capabilities and they can understand it - something which ends up causing problems for everybody significantly away from the norm in anything which is a range or a spectrum (for example, I suspect the problems around sexual orientation and transsexualism derive from this) - and people’s emotional need to feel comfortable which is challenged when they interact with people who don’t look like or behave within a certain common range of appearance or behavior people are familiar with - something which gets solved with familiarity, but that does mean that the more uncommon somebody’s pattern of behavior is or the more people like that tend to refrain from social contact, the less people in general out there will be familiar and thus comfortable with it.
A large part of the problem with these is that they’re emotional and/or subconscious, so to overcome such human tendencies in oneself one needs to be at least somewhat intelligent, know about this kind of thing, actually have enough empathy to want to do it for the other person on the other side AND have enough self-awareness to spot in themselves such tendency, a combination of character traits which is at best uncommon.