DATA ANALYSIS

Water Cooler Small Talk, Ep 7: Anscombe’s Quartet and the Datasaurus

Why descriptive statistics aren’t enough and plotting your data is always essential

Image created by the author using GPT-4

Ever heard a co-worker confidently declaring something like “”, or had a boss that demanded you to not overcomplicate things and provide , ignoring your attempts to explain why such a number doesn’t exist? Maybe you’ve even shared birthdays with a colleague, and everyone in office commented on it must be.

These moments are typical examples of water cooler small talk — a special kind of small talk, thriving around break rooms, coffee machines, and of course, water coolers. It is where employees share all kinds of corporate gossip, myths, and legends, inaccurate scientific opinions, outrageous personal anecdotes, or outright lies. Anything goes. So, in my Water Cooler Small Talk posts, I discuss strange and usually scientifically invalid opinions I have overheard in office, and explore what’s really going on.

So, here’s the water cooler opinion of today’s post:

The descriptive statistics match perfectly, so the datasets are basically the same. No need to dig…