Alligaturtle

I'm not sure I would feel comfortable using the Winsorized mean -- it doesn't have any particular statistical properties, and it lacks any intuition appeal because it's not clear what the value represents.

I can understand a line of logic that would give rise to something like the Winsorized mean -- after you look at your data, you see some obvious outliers. It feels dirty to just drop those values (which would lead to the truncated mean) because the information from an implausible value is more likely to be near the extreme than it is to be near the center mass.

What to do with those extreme values?

Here's something I now want to experiment with -- bootstrapping the extreme values. Take note of the original empirical distribution. Then, create a new distribution by removing the top and bottom X% of the observations and replacing them with values drawn i.i.d. from the original empirical distribution. This could lead to some values being replaced with the outliers that we originally wanted to drop. After we do this, record the mean. Then create new sample distributions until we have a distribution of new means. What I am curious about is how the shape if this distribution of means will be impacted depending on that X% value selected at the beginning.

What are some well-known distributions that appear to have outliers? A log-normal distribution maybe?

I agree with this sentiment. Years ago, I asked around at one of the smartphone companies whether it would be possible to certify to an end user that a photo is either:

1) Authentic and only lightly edited with image manipulation software (e.g., cropped, color balanced, or text placed over top of the image) 2) Produced on a phone that has had to go through hardware hacks

Note that the guarantee in (1) wouldn't prevent someone from taking a photo of a TV screen. When I asked that original question, I had quite a few more details about how the certification might be done, how the credentials would be hosted, and how the results would be shown on a website.

Anyway, just asking this question was met with a storm of negative responses. I counted two dozen messages that were either neutral (asking for clarification) or else outright hostile before the first hesitantly positive message. My favorite hostile response was that allowing people to certify images as real would steal peoples' rights. I didn't follow the logic, but the guy who made the argument was really into it.

There were lots of comments about how using AI would be a better solution, some commenting on how Cannon already did it (and messed up gloriously), others stating they didn't have faith in hardware... it makes a fella never want to ask a question again.

In the end, I got an expert to speculate that the technology currently exists, and has existed for 5-10 years, to do this with a modern smartphone. However, unless a high-level engineer or executive argues that providing this feature will somehow be a competitive advantage, there is no appetite to provide this kind of feature.