"I think it's fair to assume that, in this context, people are using the 'median' sense of average rather than the 'mean' sense."
Not "fair" at all, and not at all appropriate. Still want the average, the mean, the expectation because of the law of large numbers and the best L^2 approximation property of the mean. Besides, often in practice, e.g., for even positive integer n independent, identically distributed samples from a distribution absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure, the median is not even well defined.
The median is good for politically correct news stories about data from political economics.
Nobody's talking about which is the better average. I was merely suggesting that this is how you can interpret the quote in a way that escapes your attempt to show how it is incorrect.
I say the point goes to HilbertSpace here. I think Nudge wasn't merely suggesting that there's another way to interpret the quote, but was rather suggesting that was the intended way to interpret the quote. Of course, Nudge was right about that.
Not "fair" at all, and not at all appropriate. Still want the average, the mean, the expectation because of the law of large numbers and the best L^2 approximation property of the mean. Besides, often in practice, e.g., for even positive integer n independent, identically distributed samples from a distribution absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure, the median is not even well defined.
The median is good for politically correct news stories about data from political economics.