Averages Memes

Corporate sees two different target sheets and demands you find the differences. Meanwhile, statisticians are sitting there thinking, "Yeah, one's a single data point and the other is two data points with a plus sign between them—statistically equivalent when averaged." It's the perfect encapsulation of how executives obsess over meaningless variations while data scientists know that with enough mathematical gymnastics, you can make anything look identical. Two bullet holes or one? Just change your confidence interval and suddenly they're "not significantly different." Problem solved, promotion earned.

Whoever wrote "On average, there are 9.2 million doctors and 18.1 million nurses worldwide" on this tissue box clearly failed Statistics 101. Unless doctors are secretly reproducing asexually at night, there's a fixed total of medical professionals, not an "average." It's like saying "on average, water is wet." The irony of putting this statistical abomination on a product designed for sniffles when the real disease is mathematical illiteracy. Next they'll tell us there are "on average" 7 continents—sometimes 6, sometimes 8, depending on the weather.