The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.
One of the laws of nature," Gordon said, "is that half the people have got to be below average.""For a Gaussian distribution, yeah," Cooper said. "Sad, though.
Averages are useful because many traits, behaviors, and outcomes are distributed in a bell-shaped curve, with most results clustered around the middle and a much smaller group of outliers at the high and low ends.
Remember, half the people you know are below average.
Numerical quantities focus on expected values, graphical summaries on unexpected values.
The world is a bell curve. Classroom test scores, employee performance in a company or how many people really, really like you. No matter the population you're studying, they always fit neatly across the standard deviations of the famous bell curve.
The median isn't the message.
