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Manipulated data sets are like bikinis - they show you what they want to show, and hide the bits that you want to see.
by shadowsun7 16y ago
Manipulated data sets are like bikinis - they show you what they want to show, and hide the bits that you want to see.
- barrkel 16y agoThe way I heard it was that what they conceal is more important than what they reveal.
- jokermatt999 16y agoIt seems to stem from the whole "A good sermon is like a skirt: long enough to cover the essentials, but short enough to maintain interest" (paraphrased). Not the same meaning, but it appears that the phrasing came from there.
- ugh 16y agoThe data set is not even manipulated. The graph in itself is not worthless, not wrong, not even uninteresting, it’s all the stuff around it (the interpretation) that’s bullshit. You should probably never use such a skewed graph alone, though, without showing growth or decline. Relative shifts are genuinely easier to see with a graph like that (but internet traffic is probably not the right measure if you want to know something about cultural changes, time spent would probably be better; to wit, reading 1 MB is a heck of a task, listening to 1 MB won’t keep you busy for very long and blink and you will just have missed your 1 MB video).