The Flaw of Averages

Mentions per year

What Hacker News says

• refrigerator · Apr 11, 2020 · Recommends

  Hey folks, I'm one of the authors of the post. Would love to hear people's thoughts, and happy to answer any questions :) If you liked this, then I'd definitely recommend reading "The Flaw of Averages" by Sam Savage. It talks about this stuff in a lot more detail, and the style is very entertaining — not at all what you'd expect from a statistics book.

  on “Forecasting with uncertainty” ↗
• CodeCube · Sep 8, 2012 · Recommends

  Wow, great discussion on risk. The only thing I would add to the discussion is that before you try to model risk, you should read 'The Flaw of Averages', by Sam Savage - http://flawofaverages.com/ Put simply, any real risk model should probably avoid being a 'single number', but a range of probabilities. This models the distribution of possibilities…

  on “The "Wash my Ferrari" Problem: A Meditation on Risk” ↗
• simulate · Aug 24, 2012 · Recommends

  …topic of disaggregating average data and mistakes made from using averages. Here's a summary of the book on his website: http://www.stanford.edu/~savage/flaw/ and here's a link to his book, titled The Flaw of Averages: http://www.amazon.com/Flaw-Averages-Underestimate-Risk-Uncer...

  on “Be careful how you average – a retail example” ↗
• kqr · Apr 1, 2022 · Recommends

  …Womack, Machine That Changed the World. 8. How to innovate cheaply: Westrum, Sidewinder. 9. How to estimate things properly: Hubbard, How to Measure Anything. Tetlock, Superforecasting. Savage, The Flaw of Averages. 10. How to train people to be experts at things: Hoffman, Accelerated Learning. 11. How people fail at decisions: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow & Noise. I had to leave out a few about statistics,…

  on “How I operated as a Staff engineer at Heroku (2020)” ↗
• kqr · Aug 25, 2021 · Recommends

  …Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments (there are probably better books on experimental design -- I've been eyeing some of Deming's myself -- but this one is probably as good a primer as any) - The Flaw of Averages (to get more accurate predictions, focus on distributions and ranges, not single numbers) - Toyota Kata (a rote way to build a culture of continuous improvement) - Making Software: What Really Works,…

  on “An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage (2017)” ↗
• kgwgk · Jul 6, 2018 · Mentions

  In this less mathematical, more "pop science" vein I remember I enjoyed The Flaw of Averages by Sam Savage (who happens to be the son of Jimmie Savage) but I read it many years ago and I'm not sure I would still recommend it.

  on “Ask HN: What are your favorite statistics and probability textbooks?” ↗
• m0llusk · May 15, 2024 · Mentions

  This is kind of rude in that it uses the term "The Flaw of Averages" as well as some ideas and even an image from the book by the same name by Sam Savage and Jeff Danziger but gives them no credit. If you can't come up with your own expressions and drawings then you…

  on “The Flaw of Averages (2020)” ↗
• jldugger · Sep 29, 2026 · Critical

  About two thirds of the way through "Flaw of Averages". Thankfully the chapters are short but it's written for business students and is aggressively anti-jargon, which can be annoying at times. It started off promising, with some hints about monte carlo…

  on “Ask HN: What are you reading?” ↗