The Flaw of Averages

The Flaw of Averages and What to Do About It, a new book by Dr. Sam Savage, will be released in 2008. In the meantime you can enjoy a preview by reading Dr. Savages article from the San Jose Mercury News.

Other links of interest.

Download Dr. Savage's Excel based "False Positives" calculator as described in Chance Magazine in Until Proven Guilty: False Positives and the War on Terror by Sam Savage and Howard Wainer which will appear in Chance magazine, volume 21, number 1, 2008.

Some Gratuitous Inflammatory Remarks on the Accounting Industry from the Journal of Forensic Accounting

Probability Management - A Cure for the Flaw of Averages (probabilitymanagement.org)

Dr. Savage's Decision Making with Insight, book and software for Microsoft Excel (www.AnalyCorp.com)

Dr. Savage's Stanford home page

Published Sunday, October 8, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News
Copyright Š2000 by Sam Savage

The Flaw of Averages states, in effect, that: "Plans based on average assumption are wrong on average."
An apocryphal example concerns the statistician who drowned while fording a river that was, on average, only three feet deep, as depicted in the sensitive portrayal above by cartoonist Jeff Danziger.