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The Making of a Dumb Datum

Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle. Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far...
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My views were skewed regarding skewed distributions!

 


I have been doing it wrong my whole life. I realized it only very recently.

I used to look at the hump to determine the direction of skew for a distribution.

But hump represents the most frequent value in the distribution. It is not skewing the distribution.

If anything, that hump is trying its best to preserve the normal distribution despite the skewness.

The actual culprit here is the long tail. It consists of the outlier values that are skewing the distribution.

From now onwards, I will keep in mind to look at the tail instead of the hump to tell whether a distribution is left-skewed or right-skewed.






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