• 🍉 Albert 🍉@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    if you want to go into statistics, normal average are useless for these things, as many empires last a few years, while others can last thousands. they don’t fall in a normal distribution, you might need a geometric mean.

    but also, empire is such a vague term. did the Roman empire fall around the 5 century? or do you count Byzantium as the Roman empire?

    Did England start with the Norman invasion? or was it from before and the Normans were just a new dynasty?

    it’s something that’s practically impossible to count, what’s an empire? when it started/ended? and on top of that no normal distribution.

    • SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      I don’t disagree, there isn’t a great way to quantify the data, I’m just making a discussion out of the main comment seemingly missing what an average is by talking about edge cases on the high end. Also their 3 examples, which I assume are the only 3 high end cases. Already have a massive discrepancy.

      1000 and the next closest being ~600, it infers that long empires are few and far between.