Beyond Average Joe
“All models are wrong, some models are useful.” - George Box
The flaw of averages
Market research reports are generally packed full of average scores and comparisons of means, and not often enough with distributions and extremes. In the real (business) world this is a mistake as, in the words of Sam Savage’s (f)law of averages, ‘plans based on average assumptions are wrong on average’. To put this another way, errors occur in the real world when we replace uncertain numbers by single (or simple) averages. Read more »
