The Median Isn't The Message - Gould

In a week when I have seemed overwhelmed, yet again, with medical predictions and statistics and "when will I get sicker?" kind of questioning....

it helps to read this article. Stephen Jay Gould did later die of cancer, but unrelated to the first diagnosis that first led him to write this essay. Excerpted below, but the whole thing deserves a read.

We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unambiguous "beginning of life" or "definition of death," although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard "realities," and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation.

But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation.

Of course, my medical distress is chronic, not (hopefully) terminal - so I don't have the sense of urgency at the moment that Gould did. But as I look at all the medical predictions I have been handed, I too doubt the statistics.