AIUI: my intuition is Alex and Alice are points in the distribution. They don’t think about their experience in terms of population statistics. They see their individual latency times, and use that as their sample. If t is low in their experience, great the distribution is low.
But for any t that goes high that they observe (which tends to be the case in a skewed distribution such as service latencies), it drags their impression of the distribution up, dominating the shape of that impression.
But for any t that goes high that they observe (which tends to be the case in a skewed distribution such as service latencies), it drags their impression of the distribution up, dominating the shape of that impression.