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A great point, but therein lies my biggest complaint with the simplification of statistics that I see in the startup world--sometimes the technical details are actually important. As an analogy, while mass-production has given us a car that anyone can operate, we are largely helpless when one breaks down. Complications abound when individuals try to leverage an overly-simplistic view of a subject (raise your hand if you've heard "We are 95% sure the true [...] lies in this confidence interval").

To the credit of the shadier individuals in my profession, this histogram subtlety nicely highlights how it can be quite easy to bend the data to your argument using ad-hoc procedures (KDEs, hists, QQs, boxplots). A carefully chosen bin width, smoothing parameter, or covariate can present a different view of the data than some other parameter/covariate. That's why it's nice to have other statisticians capable of reproducing and disseminating the work.




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