statistical averages are basic. they are mathematically basic. any first-year stats student can calculate them. but i’m here to tell you, and i’m sure any second-year stats student has figured this out by now (less the truly gullible, which is around 50% of them ironically), is that averages are essentially useless. you don’t want to know how the average of 50 people behaves. sure, it’s all well and good to know that an individual will fall within the standard deviation or will be so close the median. what that knowledge allows you to do is to exclude outliers when you’re aiming for the average. ouch! any reasonably alive prokaryote can do that! you still won’t remotely know what that individual will do. what you really want is to know how to predict the path of that individual across the average or the regression line or whatever other signal you’re tracking. that is actual prediction. nothing we know of, by the way, reveals to us such a thing. that is the power of the quantum realm dominating our domain. factual knowledge of that will be the next true power. how far are we from that? based on anecdotal evidence that the corporate entities are barely figuring out statistical averages now (and wasting such knowledge on useless machine learning and artificial intelligence), we are leaps and bounds away from discovery. luckily, that power is beyond our reach at the moment. our insanely dumb market intelligence is still decades or centuries ahead in that regard. but woe be unto us should that power be finally uncovered… woe be unto us.