If a room has 9 people with a net worth of $0 and Bill Gates in it, then in the statistical, average sense the net worth of everyone in the room is $7.6 billion dollars. But the average doesn't really tell you anything about one particular person.
Wrong. Applying basic statistic controls would eliminate Gates from the pool as an outlier. The outlier would then be listed aside the mean. That is... unless you mean median, or range. Then those are terribly different numbers.
It tells you something. It might still make the room a good place to pitch your savings product for wealthy investors. Of course more detail is better, but you have to work with what you know (and look to learn more when you can).
It tells you something about the group as a whole (not any individual member of the group) IF you are able to gather enough data to have a representative sample of the population. If you were only able to get the net worth of 20% of the people in the above room, the vast majority of the time you'd conclude that the average net worth of the room is $0.
There are some 3.5 billion women on the planet. Do you think you've reviewed the programming work of enough of them to constitute a representative sample?
> You have to work with what you know
Yes, what I'm pointing out is that you don't have enough information to claim to know anything.
