This makes sense to me, but the rest of what you say seems to be more along the lines of "life expectance at birth is a very general measure that hides a lot of variation and therefore isn't very exact." Which is different than "life expectancy at birth has no statistical validity" which is how I interpreted your original statement.
Similarly, the standard "life-expectancy at birth" is useful only for whole-population averages, I was talking about whole populations so, er, where's the problem?
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Re: Bad statistics
Date: 2009-11-06 08:16 pm (UTC)This makes sense to me, but the rest of what you say seems to be more along the lines of "life expectance at birth is a very general measure that hides a lot of variation and therefore isn't very exact." Which is different than "life expectancy at birth has no statistical validity" which is how I interpreted your original statement.
Similarly, the standard "life-expectancy at birth" is useful only for whole-population averages,
I was talking about whole populations so, er, where's the problem?