I don't think would be a problem of armchair analysis. Rather, it would be an issue of trying to fit the wrong distribution to the data. Granted, not having eve

I don't think would be a problem of armchair analysis. Rather, it would be an issue of trying to fit the wrong distribution to the data. Granted, not having even a peek at the data would increase the likelihood that the distribution someone pulled out of their hat is wrong. But it doesn't prevent people from making that mistake. I don't think the tail of the techiness distribution would be an issue either, because this tail isn't that fat. Techiness is most likely constrained to a definite variance. I mean, Googlers are part of that tail, yet none of them are some sort of post-singularitarian cyborg, beyond the comprehension of their own colleagues. It might sound stupid, but this is the sort of thing we expect to see in the fat-tailed distributions.