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I really don't get people's admiration of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." I bought and read it years ago with great excitement, but felt very

I really don't get people's admiration of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." I bought and read it years ago with great excitement, but felt very let down by it. I wrote a detailed Amazon review about it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R11NYC3OE3LBE/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1930824130 https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R11NYC3OE3LBE/ref...

someguydave 9y ago
I went to a Tufte talk and it was much better. It included "free" copies of his books and to be honest I wasn't very impressed with them either. They didn't convey his main points very well. The biggest takeaway I got from his talk was that it's better to substitute a stack of low-information powerpoint slides with a few high density images along with a paper written in normal English. But to be honest, it's way less work to make a stack of low-information powerpoint slides, so that's here to stay.
jacobolus 9y ago
I think you basically entirely missed the point of the book, to the point of obtuse deliberate misreading. Given the amount of work you clearly put into your review, and your apparent ability to write (and presumably comprehend) coherent sentences, I’m baffled. You don’t seem to understand at all what Tufte means by chartjunk (even though he prints dozens of explicit examples and explains what is wrong with each one at length), you don’t seem to understand what he is getting at with the thought-experiment-like demonstrations of chapter 6. You have an overly literal and pedantic reading of his tongue-in-cheek dry humor. And you seem to have completely skipped the detailed analysis and explanations of the principles laid out in the book if you think that “Tufte's principles totally ignore the primary purpose of graphs, which is to show a data set's patterns (or lack thereof) to humans.” My one-sentence summary of the book would be “information graphics need to spend more effort on showing patterns.” That’s the central abiding message of the book, which Tufte hits us all over the head with again and again, on almost every page.
- haberman 9y ago
  > My one-sentence summary of the book would be “information graphics need to spend more effort on showing patterns.” That’s the central abiding message of the book, which Tufte hits us all over the head with again and again, on almost every page. I just searched the book for the word "pattern" and it appears on only six pages in the entire book. Tufte throughout the book is far more impressed with how many data points you can jam into a graph than how clearly the graph conveys a pattern or idea. I'm also curious which of Tufte's statements I quoted that you think were intended to be taken tongue-in-cheek. They all seem pretty straightforward and factual. Your reply reinforces my belief that most people's admiration of this book has to do with what they imagine it says, rather than what it actually says.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    I would reply at length and quote extensively from every section of the book, but 15 years of internet arguments has convinced me there’s really little point and it would be largely a waste of time. If you can even flip through the pages in a few seconds and come to the conclusion that Tufte doesn’t care about how clearly graphics convey data, there’s really nothing I’m going to say that can convince you. So I’ll just leave it at “bae, you cray-cray”. I can only recommend re-reading the book closely and carefully, ideally spending 5 or 10 minutes really looking at and thinking about each graphic. Maybe start with the first few pages where Tufte lays out his criteria for graphical excellence. You may also want to look at his 2 subsequent books Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations wherein he goes into considerably more detail about particular aspects and techniques statistical graphics can use to show various types of patterns. I have probably spent 50 hours over the years studying Tufte’s four data-viz books, and every time I look I find something enlightening, fascinating, or inspiring. Some individual pages reward 30 minutes or more of careful study. If you can’t find anything useful inside, I don’t know what to tell you.
    - haberman 9y ago
      > If you can even flip through the pages in a few seconds and come to the conclusion that Tufte doesn’t care about how clearly graphics convey data That's not what I said. If you project your own meaning onto my 100-word comment, it does not surprise me that you project your own meaning onto an entire book.

someguydave 9y ago

I went to a Tufte talk and it was much better. It included "free" copies of his books and to be honest I wasn't very impressed with them either. They didn't convey his main points very well. The biggest takeaway I got from his talk was that it's better to substitute a stack of low-information powerpoint slides with a few high density images along with a paper written in normal English. But to be honest, it's way less work to make a stack of low-information powerpoint slides, so that's here to stay.

jacobolus 9y ago

I think you basically entirely missed the point of the book, to the point of obtuse deliberate misreading. Given the amount of work you clearly put into your review, and your apparent ability to write (and presumably comprehend) coherent sentences, I’m baffled. You don’t seem to understand at all what Tufte means by chartjunk (even though he prints dozens of explicit examples and explains what is wrong with each one at length), you don’t seem to understand what he is getting at with the thought-experiment-like demonstrations of chapter 6. You have an overly literal and pedantic reading of his tongue-in-cheek dry humor. And you seem to have completely skipped the detailed analysis and explanations of the principles laid out in the book if you think that “Tufte's principles totally ignore the primary purpose of graphs, which is to show a data set's patterns (or lack thereof) to humans.” My one-sentence summary of the book would be “information graphics need to spend more effort on showing patterns.” That’s the central abiding message of the book, which Tufte hits us all over the head with again and again, on almost every page.

haberman 9y ago
> My one-sentence summary of the book would be “information graphics need to spend more effort on showing patterns.” That’s the central abiding message of the book, which Tufte hits us all over the head with again and again, on almost every page. I just searched the book for the word "pattern" and it appears on only six pages in the entire book. Tufte throughout the book is far more impressed with how many data points you can jam into a graph than how clearly the graph conveys a pattern or idea. I'm also curious which of Tufte's statements I quoted that you think were intended to be taken tongue-in-cheek. They all seem pretty straightforward and factual. Your reply reinforces my belief that most people's admiration of this book has to do with what they imagine it says, rather than what it actually says.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  I would reply at length and quote extensively from every section of the book, but 15 years of internet arguments has convinced me there’s really little point and it would be largely a waste of time. If you can even flip through the pages in a few seconds and come to the conclusion that Tufte doesn’t care about how clearly graphics convey data, there’s really nothing I’m going to say that can convince you. So I’ll just leave it at “bae, you cray-cray”. I can only recommend re-reading the book closely and carefully, ideally spending 5 or 10 minutes really looking at and thinking about each graphic. Maybe start with the first few pages where Tufte lays out his criteria for graphical excellence. You may also want to look at his 2 subsequent books Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations wherein he goes into considerably more detail about particular aspects and techniques statistical graphics can use to show various types of patterns. I have probably spent 50 hours over the years studying Tufte’s four data-viz books, and every time I look I find something enlightening, fascinating, or inspiring. Some individual pages reward 30 minutes or more of careful study. If you can’t find anything useful inside, I don’t know what to tell you.
  - haberman 9y ago
    > If you can even flip through the pages in a few seconds and come to the conclusion that Tufte doesn’t care about how clearly graphics convey data That's not what I said. If you project your own meaning onto my 100-word comment, it does not surprise me that you project your own meaning onto an entire book.