deviation

But that tells me nothing if I want a standard deviation, unless you have that built in too.

No such criminality could be applied to the CEO's deviation from their duties.

>> The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists> What an assertion!

Standard deviation tells you how volatile measurements are not what mean deviation is.

The occasional deviation from the typical strategy is like a bluff in cards.

So first about the article:>>The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientistsWhat an assertion!

I think he makes a valid point that STD is used more frequently than it should be.> Ok so he asserted that people should just use mean deviation instead of mean of squares.

They'll never know what life is really like in the data trenches, watching your best buddy get renormalized just one standard deviation away from you.

I mean "we should retire standard deviation because everybody misues it and it's not useful for real life" without any examples ?

Latency is never normally distributed, and if they recorded the standard deviation they’d notice it’s several times larger than the mean.

Guess what though, taking the squares have a purpose: it penalizes big deviations so two situations which have the same mean deviation but one is more stable have different standard deviations.

For instance a study of chess players found that the average amount of practice time needed to reach the Master level is ~11000 hours -- but the standard deviation of the distribution is more than 5000 hours.

That this misnaming causes a cognitive dissonance that confuses even knowledgeable practitioners to mentally conflate it with the mean deviation.

Those are both very real life things just not the same thing.>>It is all due to a historical accident: in 1893, the great Karl Pearson introduced the term "standard deviation" for what had been known as "root mean square error".

You're presupposing that whatever admissions standard existed before was "neutral" and any deviation from that involves discrimination.

Any deviation from that norm is "bias".Keeping identifying information in a centralized location that is subject to subpoena by law enforcement is a norm now, too, one that has serious social consequences.

I sometimes think that progress in the 21st century will be summed up as: "The realization that the normal distribution is not the only way to model data".Taleb's favorite topic is the "black swan event" which is something that the normal distribution, and the idea of standard deviation, don't model that well.