Why is the Median a thing? Why would someone need to find the Median of a data set?

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I know it’s a common saying that statistics isn’t intuitive to humans. I’ve read my Taleb. *Intuitively*, I can see why one might need to find the mean (average) of a data set as well as the mode.

But where and why would someone need to find the Median? I’ve never calculated the median of a data set in daily life. On the other hand, I compute the mean of several values multiple times a week sometimes. I don’t calculate Modes that much, but I can see **why** someone would care about the most-occurring value.

Can someone explain the relevance of finding the Median? I’m sure there are plenty of useful applications and I’m just unaware of them.

Thanks in advance!

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14 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

My favourite example is Steve the spider-lover.

On average, a person eats 3 spiders every night. But that’s just because Steve eats 30 billion spiders every night. He loves them.

Regular people don’t eat spiders. The median is 0 spiders every night.

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