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.