“I have no idea who Catalina Garcia is, but she makes a decent ruler”: I don’t know if John Lee “little twerp” Anderson actually suffers from tall-person syndrome, but he is indeed tall

I just want to share with you the best comment we’ve every had in the nearly ten-year history of this blog. Also it has statistical content!

Here’s the story. After seeing an amusing article by Tom Scocca relating how reporter John Lee Anderson called someone as a “little twerp” on twitter:

I conjectured that Anderson suffered from “tall person syndrome,” that problem that some people of above-average height have, that they think they’re more important than other people because they literally look down on them.

But I had no idea of Anderson’s actual height. Commenter Gary responded with this impressive bit of investigative reporting:

Based on this picture: he appears to be fairly tall. But the perspective makes it hard to judge.

Based on this picture: he appears to be about 9-10 inches taller than Catalina Garcia.

But how tall is Catalina Garcia? Not that tall – she’s shorter than the high-wire artist Phillipe Petit:

And he doesn’t appear to be that tall . . . about the same height as Claire Danes: who according to Google is 5′ 6″.

So if Jon Lee Anderson is 10″ taller than Catalina Garcia, who is 2″ shorter than Philippe Petit, who is the same height as Claire Danes, then he is 6′ 2″ tall.

I have no idea who Catalina Garcia is, but she makes a decent ruler.

In a followup comment, Gary laments that his analysis does not account for footwear-induced height variation. But that additional uncertainty could be incorporated into the above analysis via a simple Stan model, with an error term for each observation.

P.S. Just to be clear, I don’t think all or even most tall people suffer from “tall person syndrome,” nor do I think that most short people have a “Napoleon complex.” But I do think some tall people have this problem. My message to Anderson: (1) Don’t drink and tweet (or, as he would say, Tweet), (2) When you tweet something you shouldn’t, just apologize.