We used to be more skeptical of what other people were trying to peddle, now we just don't have enough time to spot the 'misleading'.
I think it is funny that early in the video, the narrator describes the use of changing values along the x or y axis to make the charted data seem more significant. The example was a graph showing the reliability of Chevy trucks seemed to show that Chevy is twice as reliable as Toyota and several times more than Nissan—but the graph really shows that they are all better than 95% reliable, and there is only a ~3% difference in reliability between the most and least reliable. But then, at the end, the narrator explains that an ocean temperature graph showing little change since 1880 is misleading because it *didn’t* change the scale to exaggerate the change.
If you want to determine how graphing techniques can be manipulated, you have to apply the same standards across the board.
You can’t have it both ways.
Learned all this in 4th and 5th grade, back in early ‘60s. Shame the kiddies aren’t educated as well today.
The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.So the way to tell if someone is trying to convince you of something is to look and see if their lips are moving.The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors . .
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
Skepticism is the golden mean between naïveté and cynicism. Enough to often, at least, avoid afterwards being both ashamed and astonished that we could possibly think of believing a positive assertion - and not enough to eliminate faith, hope and love."
Look for the CNN logo?
His now classic graph of Napoleons March to Russia is a tour de force of the sheer amount of data displayed in a single graph. The first edition was accompanied by a poster of that graph.
You're welcome.
Bfl
If a graph is being used to convince you of something it’s false. There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and graphs.
I use graphs a lot. All of the points in the article are pretty basic stuff. Heck, the chevy truck type of manipulation was one I learned about in high school in 1970.
And has anybody seen the youtube video showing the Climate change “hockey stick” when inserted into the graph of hundreds of thousands of years of data? It’d comical. And that is even assuming the hockey stick itself was not manipulated in the first place.
I ran across one a week or so ago. It was a CNN graph showing the percentage increases in viewership over the previous rating period. I wish I had bookmarked that now.
It basically showed CNN growth at huge percentages over the previous rating period. However, it did NOT give any actual viewership numbers. Thus, if CNN had 100 viewers last month and 150 this month, they could claim a massive percentage increase (50%), while the actual increase is only 50 viewers.
It was deceptive in that it claimed CNN has the largest PERCENTAGE increase in viewers of any news network.