PHIL 210 Study Guide - Final Guide: Percentile, 5,6,7,8, Spurious Relationship
Document Summary
It depends on how well we understand the state of affairs it represents, and on how accurate it is. Interpreting representative numbers: percentages, percentiles, ordinal numbers, averages. In all cases, the crucial questions involve: lost information, misleading suggestion, whether the metric, or underlying measurement, is intelligibly mathematized. Percentages: not (normally) an absolute number, meaningfulness depends in part on the size of the absolute values involved, cannot be straightforwardly combined with other percentages, without knowing and controlling for differences in absolute values. For example: 40% of class 1 got an a grade and 60% of class 2 got an a grade, we cannot average these and conclude that 50% of both classes combined got an a grade. The tax relief is for everyone who pays income taxes and it will help our economy immediately: 92 million americans will keep, this year, an average of almost ,000 more of their own money. George w. bush, state of the union address, 2003.