eli5 is average height studies objective or subjective?

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I was having a conversation with my best friend and they said that the average height is a subject thing bc in order for it to be objective they need to have study or gotten all the heights from every man in American. I’m not certain how data or stats work. But maybe it’s objective only by those who have been tested on average? Idk how to explain it to them or if I’m wrong help me understand a bit better.

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36 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your friend needs a course in statistics.

Objective and subjective have nothing to do with how statistics are collected. It’s about whether the thing you are looking at can be measured (e.g. height) or not (e.g. how do you rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10).

It’s true that we can’t know the exact average height without measuring every person, but we can get pretty darn close by studying a random sample of them. If you called a thousand random people and asked how tall they were and averaged that, you’d have a fairly accurate idea what the average height is. You could be wrong, but larger samples and more refined techniques can improve the accuracy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your friend needs a course in statistics.

Objective and subjective have nothing to do with how statistics are collected. It’s about whether the thing you are looking at can be measured (e.g. height) or not (e.g. how do you rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10).

It’s true that we can’t know the exact average height without measuring every person, but we can get pretty darn close by studying a random sample of them. If you called a thousand random people and asked how tall they were and averaged that, you’d have a fairly accurate idea what the average height is. You could be wrong, but larger samples and more refined techniques can improve the accuracy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your friend needs a course in statistics.

Objective and subjective have nothing to do with how statistics are collected. It’s about whether the thing you are looking at can be measured (e.g. height) or not (e.g. how do you rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10).

It’s true that we can’t know the exact average height without measuring every person, but we can get pretty darn close by studying a random sample of them. If you called a thousand random people and asked how tall they were and averaged that, you’d have a fairly accurate idea what the average height is. You could be wrong, but larger samples and more refined techniques can improve the accuracy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think the word you are looking for is Approximate. We can never know the exact average height of an American unless we measure them all. And even if we did by the next day some would have died and others been born so it wouldn’t be exact any more.

But with a sample we can calculate an approximate value objectively. And there is a whole branch of maths called statistics on how big a sample you need to be sure enough how close your approximation is.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think the word you are looking for is Approximate. We can never know the exact average height of an American unless we measure them all. And even if we did by the next day some would have died and others been born so it wouldn’t be exact any more.

But with a sample we can calculate an approximate value objectively. And there is a whole branch of maths called statistics on how big a sample you need to be sure enough how close your approximation is.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think the word you are looking for is Approximate. We can never know the exact average height of an American unless we measure them all. And even if we did by the next day some would have died and others been born so it wouldn’t be exact any more.

But with a sample we can calculate an approximate value objectively. And there is a whole branch of maths called statistics on how big a sample you need to be sure enough how close your approximation is.