Mumbo-jumbo

A single engineer earning £90k does nothing to better any number earning £22k

The letter from Helen Hallpike says something completely different to me from what she intends it to say and what it implies: to me it says 'here is another statistician trying to pretend that there is meaning in a mumbo-jumbo practice that has somehow acquired the respectability of a science'. The advent of specialist terminology to obfuscate the meaning of such simple terms as 'average' does not make a discipline and the significance of median is something I have never understood, a point which Ms. H. makes very well, if inadvertently.

The existence of a single engineer earning £90k does nothing to better any number earning £22k whatever the way of putting it across. The only meaningful presentation for data of this sort is a simple bar chart of salary on one axis and numbers paid that salary on another. 

Perhaps that would be uncomfortably revealing in terms of both message and the simplicity of the science needed to create it.

John Gayfer, Alcester, Warwickshire