5 ms·

Please note that some of the graphs there start with 50% as original y-axis. It creates an appearance of males drinking twice as much as females, for example.

tumult 16y ago
I guess if you're the kind of person who likes looking at bars instead of reading the text that gives them meaning as well. I think a floor set at number like 0.5 and with a linear scale is pretty reasonable for readability, unless you're a lout and ignore those little letters that tell you what things actually are.
- chancho 16y ago
  WTF is the point of a graph if you have to read the fine print to avoid misinterpreting it? Why not just use a table? A graph is supposed to convey the relative magnitudes of the data points, not just their ranking. If I just wanted to show who drank more than whom I would just list them in order. Looking at these graphs you'd think that: Almost nobody in the south drinks; The vast majority of blacks do not drink; Catholics are twice as likely to drink as Protestants. And so on, when in fact these are all false conclusions. The real conclusion, which you would easily get from properly scaled graphs, is that the majority of people drink across almost all demographic groups. If you blame me for drawing false conclusions from such graphs I blame the shitty fucking graphs for being misleading. I mean, they don't all even start at 50%. One starts at %40 and one at %0. Seriously, these graphs are garbage.
  - jey 16y ago
    Er, so all graphs of temperature should start at absolute zero? It's absurd to expect all graphs to start at zero -- the point of a bar graph is to show relative comparisons, and the whole point of the labels on the axes is to relate the graph to an absolute scale. You even admit this, "[a] graph is supposed to convey the relative magnitudes of the data points" -- Exactly, and so the graph should be scaled in a way that efficiently conveys the relative information. I apologize for the ad hominem, but this is just serious PEBKAC: you need to learn to read graphs. The mistaken conclusions you arrived at could have been avoided if you paid attention to the labels. Yes, a poorly made graph can make a tiny effect look huge, e.g. if it was the case that 99% of people drank, and the graph was just plotting variation within the remaining 1%, that could be pretty misleading. This is yet another reason that the consumers of information should pay attention to the labels and understand what the real message is from the data. Don't expect the creators of the graph to present the data in the "fairest" way (whatever that is); instead it's our responsibility to think critically and make sure we understand what's really going on. The creator of the graph will naturally act to advance his own interests. tl;dr: It's a mistake to consider the labels to be "fine print".
    - chancho 16y ago
      You make a good point about temperature, but I stand by my critique because temperature is a quantity and these graphs are all plotting percentages, which should always been graphed from 0% to 100%. If your percentages are all within the range of 99% to 100% then you shouldn't be plotting them as percentages, and if you did then your graph would effectively convey the point that there really isn't a lot of variation among the data. I'll reiterate my opinion that the purpose of a bar chart is not to give relative orderings (if you want that just list them in order) but to illustrate the magnitude of the differences between data points with respect to the natural range of the data. Percentages have a natural range of values: 0-100. Temperature does not have a natural fixed range, unless we're talking about the weather which is incidentally why I like Fahrenheit.
      - jey 16y ago
        > with respect to the natural range of the data. There's hardly ever such a thing as a "natural" range. Even if there is, as in the case of percentages, what's the point on wasting half of the graph on variation that has a mundane explanation? Like if you're plotting popularity of religions in the USA, do you really want to spend about 90% of the vertical space of your graph on Christianity? The point a graph is to shed light on the part of the variation that doesn't have a mundane explanation -- i.e., the interesting part. What you should be complaining about are graphs that don't have labels, as used by some drug companies in advertisements[1]. Maybe that "graphs without labels are bad" meme has maybe been misinterpreted here. 1. In the USA drug companies are permitted to advertise prescription medications.
        chancho 16y ago
        > There's hardly ever such a thing as a "natural" range. Another good point, but if bar A is twice as tall as bar B then variable A's value had better be twice that of B's. Anything else is precisely the kind of shady drug-company data manipulation that you're so concerned about. If vertical space is at an absolute premium (not the case here IMO) and you have to cut the bars then draw little cut marks on them to let the reader know that the bottoms aren't at zero. (Of course I'm talking about cases when there is a familar concept of zero, like percentages or money or population, not temperature. And if the value goes negative then the bar grows down, cf. any recent chart of US economic indicators.) If you don't base your bars at zero then your bar chart exaggerates differences between data because the reader looks at two bars and compares their relative sizes the same way he looks at the levels in two glasses of beer to compare their volumes.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- samdk 16y ago
  The issue is not at all readability. The issue is that the way the data is presented changes your interpretation of it. If you try to puzzle out the meaning from these graphs you can. But even if you do you're going to have to fight with the visuals to do so. Is 70 twice 60? No, but it looks like it is when the x-axis starts at 50. You shouldn't have to try. You shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize all of the numbers there. That's the entire point of presenting the data visually.
  - Confusion 16y ago
    Is 70 twice 60? No, but it looks like it is when the x-axis starts at 50. However, when you start the axis at 0, the differences between the differences seem very small, while they are what is interesting. That is why this graph start at a different value: the author isn't interested in the absolute numbers: he's interested in the differences from a baseline. Now he could have shown a graph where '0' was the average and plot all the differences, but then many more people would have become confused. Instead he choose the '50' as a baseline, arbitrarily. Both you and the grandparent are completely wrong in acting all indignant that someone would display a graph like this, when it is a well accepted way to draw attention to the aspects that matter. If I started such a graph at 0, my thesis advisor would rhetorically ask me "What are you trying to convey here?". From any graph, you can draw right and wrong conclusions. You insist that this graph is wrong because the simplest conclusion you can draw from it is wrong. Well, that's not the fault of the graph: that is the fault of you trying to interpret the graph in an overly naive way, without considering the point of the graph.
    - Retric 16y ago
      The differences between 70 and 60 is not that small (~15%). There are many ways you can use chart's to try and mislead people, but when you need to do that it's a sign that you are trying to suggest something that's not true. PS: The first words out of a competent thesis advisory when looking at those charts would be "where are the error bars?"
    - samdk 16y ago
      But the data we're dealing with here isn't on the order of a few percentage points. The values range from about 45-85 on most of them, which is plenty large enough to see given a full range from 0-100. And there's absolutely no reason to use three different scales for four different graphs when the data on all of them is in roughly the same range. I'm not insisting that the graphs are wrong. I'm saying that they're done badly because they're confusing and make it very easy to draw incorrect conclusions about the data.

tumult 16y ago

I guess if you're the kind of person who likes looking at bars instead of reading the text that gives them meaning as well. I think a floor set at number like 0.5 and with a linear scale is pretty reasonable for readability, unless you're a lout and ignore those little letters that tell you what things actually are.

chancho 16y ago
WTF is the point of a graph if you have to read the fine print to avoid misinterpreting it? Why not just use a table? A graph is supposed to convey the relative magnitudes of the data points, not just their ranking. If I just wanted to show who drank more than whom I would just list them in order. Looking at these graphs you'd think that: Almost nobody in the south drinks; The vast majority of blacks do not drink; Catholics are twice as likely to drink as Protestants. And so on, when in fact these are all false conclusions. The real conclusion, which you would easily get from properly scaled graphs, is that the majority of people drink across almost all demographic groups. If you blame me for drawing false conclusions from such graphs I blame the shitty fucking graphs for being misleading. I mean, they don't all even start at 50%. One starts at %40 and one at %0. Seriously, these graphs are garbage.
- jey 16y ago
  Er, so all graphs of temperature should start at absolute zero? It's absurd to expect all graphs to start at zero -- the point of a bar graph is to show relative comparisons, and the whole point of the labels on the axes is to relate the graph to an absolute scale. You even admit this, "[a] graph is supposed to convey the relative magnitudes of the data points" -- Exactly, and so the graph should be scaled in a way that efficiently conveys the relative information. I apologize for the ad hominem, but this is just serious PEBKAC: you need to learn to read graphs. The mistaken conclusions you arrived at could have been avoided if you paid attention to the labels. Yes, a poorly made graph can make a tiny effect look huge, e.g. if it was the case that 99% of people drank, and the graph was just plotting variation within the remaining 1%, that could be pretty misleading. This is yet another reason that the consumers of information should pay attention to the labels and understand what the real message is from the data. Don't expect the creators of the graph to present the data in the "fairest" way (whatever that is); instead it's our responsibility to think critically and make sure we understand what's really going on. The creator of the graph will naturally act to advance his own interests. tl;dr: It's a mistake to consider the labels to be "fine print".
  - chancho 16y ago
    You make a good point about temperature, but I stand by my critique because temperature is a quantity and these graphs are all plotting percentages, which should always been graphed from 0% to 100%. If your percentages are all within the range of 99% to 100% then you shouldn't be plotting them as percentages, and if you did then your graph would effectively convey the point that there really isn't a lot of variation among the data. I'll reiterate my opinion that the purpose of a bar chart is not to give relative orderings (if you want that just list them in order) but to illustrate the magnitude of the differences between data points with respect to the natural range of the data. Percentages have a natural range of values: 0-100. Temperature does not have a natural fixed range, unless we're talking about the weather which is incidentally why I like Fahrenheit.
    - jey 16y ago
      > with respect to the natural range of the data. There's hardly ever such a thing as a "natural" range. Even if there is, as in the case of percentages, what's the point on wasting half of the graph on variation that has a mundane explanation? Like if you're plotting popularity of religions in the USA, do you really want to spend about 90% of the vertical space of your graph on Christianity? The point a graph is to shed light on the part of the variation that doesn't have a mundane explanation -- i.e., the interesting part. What you should be complaining about are graphs that don't have labels, as used by some drug companies in advertisements[1]. Maybe that "graphs without labels are bad" meme has maybe been misinterpreted here. 1. In the USA drug companies are permitted to advertise prescription medications.
      - chancho 16y ago
        > There's hardly ever such a thing as a "natural" range. Another good point, but if bar A is twice as tall as bar B then variable A's value had better be twice that of B's. Anything else is precisely the kind of shady drug-company data manipulation that you're so concerned about. If vertical space is at an absolute premium (not the case here IMO) and you have to cut the bars then draw little cut marks on them to let the reader know that the bottoms aren't at zero. (Of course I'm talking about cases when there is a familar concept of zero, like percentages or money or population, not temperature. And if the value goes negative then the bar grows down, cf. any recent chart of US economic indicators.) If you don't base your bars at zero then your bar chart exaggerates differences between data because the reader looks at two bars and compares their relative sizes the same way he looks at the levels in two glasses of beer to compare their volumes.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
samdk 16y ago
The issue is not at all readability. The issue is that the way the data is presented changes your interpretation of it. If you try to puzzle out the meaning from these graphs you can. But even if you do you're going to have to fight with the visuals to do so. Is 70 twice 60? No, but it looks like it is when the x-axis starts at 50. You shouldn't have to try. You shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize all of the numbers there. That's the entire point of presenting the data visually.
- Confusion 16y ago
  Is 70 twice 60? No, but it looks like it is when the x-axis starts at 50. However, when you start the axis at 0, the differences between the differences seem very small, while they are what is interesting. That is why this graph start at a different value: the author isn't interested in the absolute numbers: he's interested in the differences from a baseline. Now he could have shown a graph where '0' was the average and plot all the differences, but then many more people would have become confused. Instead he choose the '50' as a baseline, arbitrarily. Both you and the grandparent are completely wrong in acting all indignant that someone would display a graph like this, when it is a well accepted way to draw attention to the aspects that matter. If I started such a graph at 0, my thesis advisor would rhetorically ask me "What are you trying to convey here?". From any graph, you can draw right and wrong conclusions. You insist that this graph is wrong because the simplest conclusion you can draw from it is wrong. Well, that's not the fault of the graph: that is the fault of you trying to interpret the graph in an overly naive way, without considering the point of the graph.
  - Retric 16y ago
    The differences between 70 and 60 is not that small (~15%). There are many ways you can use chart's to try and mislead people, but when you need to do that it's a sign that you are trying to suggest something that's not true. PS: The first words out of a competent thesis advisory when looking at those charts would be "where are the error bars?"
  - samdk 16y ago
    But the data we're dealing with here isn't on the order of a few percentage points. The values range from about 45-85 on most of them, which is plenty large enough to see given a full range from 0-100. And there's absolutely no reason to use three different scales for four different graphs when the data on all of them is in roughly the same range. I'm not insisting that the graphs are wrong. I'm saying that they're done badly because they're confusing and make it very easy to draw incorrect conclusions about the data.