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solipsist comments on Open thread, January 25- February 1 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (316)
How does that answer the question?
It's true that the center of gravity is a mean, but the moment of inertia is not a variance. It's one thing to say something is "proportional to a variance" to mean that the constant is 2 or pi, but when the constant is the number of points, I think it's missing the statistical point.
But the bigger problem is that these are not statistical examples! Means and sums of squares occur many places, but why are they are a good choice for the central tendency and the tendency to be central? Are you suggesting that we think of a random variable as a physical rod? Why? Does trying to spin it have any probabilistic or statistical meaning?
I wasn't aiming to answer Locaha's question as much as figure out what question to answer. The range of math knowledge here is high, and I don't know where Locaha stands. I mean,
That could be a basic question about the meaning of averages -- the sort of knowledge I internalized so deeply that I have trouble forming it into words.
But maybe Locaha's asking a question like:
That's a less philosophical question. So if Locaha says "means are like the centers of mass! I never understood that intuition until now!", I'll have a different follow up than if Locaha says "Yes, captain obvious, of course means are like centers of mass. I'm asking about XYZ".