First: I wanna clarify this. I know that loads of people read like 100 books a year, or read all the time. I know these people exist. I’m asking about people that are like… average. An average american who just… reads. Doesn’t track everything or sets goals of like 100, or never stops reading… Anyway, I’ve been searching this up, and i find answers like 15-50, even 100. I find this highly unlikely, especially for average US citizens. Half the people i know don’t even pick up 5 books a year, let alone 15! I just don’t believe these stats. I read somewhere that people read 8 a month on average? That can’t be right for an average person. That’s like 2 books a week… I know people do read this much, but still… For an average person? So be real… how many books do people actually read a year?

  • walk_with_curiosity@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’m going to piggyback on your comment, because this is something that comes up in my work and is confusing for a lot of people, and has become a bit of a bugaboo.

    Average and mean are often used interchangably, but they are NOT perfect synonyms.

    Average essentially just means ‘a number that best represents a data set’. While the arithmetic mean is the most common way of finding that, median and mode are also methods (and there are other, more complex methods in some cases, as well as best practices for some data such as removing outliars, etc).

    This is important because there is no objectively correct way to find the ‘average’ of a set of data.

    It’s a judgement call and it is sometimes used by bad faith actors to skew a message or just by people who don’t really know what they’re doing. If you’re reviewing research, it’s always important to clarify how they obtained their average and consider if that was the best method. (Similarly if someone says something “doubles your risk of X”, make sure you find out what the original risk was! The double of .0005 is probably not something you have to worry about. “Doubles the X” is a great way of making a number sound big when it might not be large at all.)