171–173 of 173 posts
FYI, typo: > “In the below graph, half of the data is to the left (shaded in blue), and a half is to the right (shaded in purple), with the 50th percentile directly in the center.” But the half on the right is actually shaded yellow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no hope of finding a cite for this, but a long time ago I read some command line UI research that found if you had a system where commands ranged from instant to taking a small but noticeable time and you introduced delays in the faster commands to make it so all commands took the same small but noticeable time people would think that the system was now faster overall.
Presumably, also the reason we have those fake queue lines at airports (not sure the correct word is for it).
Long queues are a prime target for terrorists, and if something bad happens, small groups of people are more manageable than large groups.
One way to think about why we tend to use averages instead of medians is that it is related to a really deep theorem in probability: The Central Limit Theorem. But I think we can twist our heads and see in a way that this is backwards. Mathematically, the mean is much easier to work with because it is linear and we can do algebra with it. That's how we got the Central Limit Theorem. Percentiles and the median, except…
A good example of this is when people say "more than half of drivers say they are above average drivers! Idiots!" Of course that's perfectly possible if most drivers are basically fine and some are really really bad. For example, 99.99% of people have greater than the average number of legs.
The correct impossible statement would be if more than half of drivers are better than the median driver.