To use just the final example: A handful of actors take home more than $10 million per year, while thousands and thousands live on the breadline. Would you advise your son or daughter to get into acting since the average wage is pretty decent? Hopefully not—wrong reason. In conclusion: If someone uses the word “average,” think twice. Try to work out the underlying distribution. If a single anomaly has almost no influence on the set, the concept is still worthwhile. However, when extreme cases dominate (such as the Bill Gates phenomenon), we should discount the term “average.” We should all
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