Transcriber:
When we think about data,
we usually think about averages.
Average height, average salary,
average number of hours
spent on video calls.
It’s tempting to focus on these neat
little summaries of our world.
But the world is a lot messier
than these averages can make it out to be.
So instead, I look for the outliers.
They can offer a better reflection
of this chaos we call life.
And they can offer a different perspective
on the things that we think we understand.
[Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi]
Take, for instance, the stats
around teens and cigarettes.
According to the CDC,
between 1997 and 2019,
the percentage of American
high school students who smoked plummeted
from 36 to just six percent.
That seems like a pretty big win,
but when you break apart the data
and look at the outliers,
it is a totally different picture.
Among American Indian
and native Alaskan students,
cigarette usage is much higher
than that six percent average.
It comes in at a sizable 21 percent.
All other racial and ethnic groups
were in the single digits.
So what first seemed
like this great success story
is actually an indicator
of how much work we need to do
to reach some of the most
marginalized communities.
In general, when we present
data as a scatterplot,
the average would usually look like this.
And where there are outliers,
the typical approach
is to undervalue them,
to see them as a deviation
from the average
or from what society thinks is normal.
But I like to call
these outliers “lost birds.”
It's a nickname I use for something
or someone who has gone astray.
If you look hard enough,
you'll find that these lost birds
pop up everywhere.
Like my mom, for example.
She doesn't like being on camera,
so this puppet will have to do.
She's a soft spoken, hijabi woman
who isn't much bigger than this puppet.
Because of that, it's easy for some people
to underestimate her.
But don't let those first
impressions fool you.
“In my generation,
we used to listen
and accept what they tell us.
'Do what you're told.'
But when I got older,
I just changed and I started to argue
my point and get what I want."
My mom's a retired doctor,
an avid ugly-dress maker,
a mother of two and a grandmother of none.
Though she spends a fair amount of time
trying to speak that into existence,
"I think for every mother,
for her daughter, she wants a grandchild."
(Laughter)
"Sorry, Mona."
Moving on.
My mom is also a lost bird.
"Me?"
She has, statistically
speaking, gone astray.
"Yeah, but it was a good deviation."
Back in the late '70s,
my mom left Iraq and moved to the UK
to further her medical
training and practice.
She's among the four percent of people
born in Iraq who now live abroad.
By the early 2000s,
just three percent of UK doctors
with her experience
were non-white and practicing
in her speciality.
My mom is a lost bird
because she is an outlier.
She's one of the rare few
to leave her home country
and even rarer still
among her medical peers.
We all think that the people
that we love are special,
and there is some truth to that.
But it’s worth considering the ways
that we are all lost birds.
Because when we focus on the average
and we ignore the outliers,
we lose all of the richness and insights
that those stories provide.
But when we dig into the deviations,
we get to see the bigger picture.
One from a bird's-eye view.