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And don’t over use viz. Pictures do effectively communicate, but often people visualize without understanding. The result is pretty pictures that eventually peo

by p33p 9y ago

And don’t over use viz. Pictures do effectively communicate, but often people visualize without understanding. The result is pretty pictures that eventually people realize communicate little effective domain insight. You’d be surprised that sometimes simple and ugly pictures communicate more insight than beautiful ones do. I don't necessarily agree with this. Yes, a sound understanding of the domain and knowledge of the mathematics and statistics are vital to gaining insights. But. I would make a very clear distinction between exploratory data viz and explanatory data viz. Data visualization when presenting those insights is an important part of driving decision making.

barskern 9y ago
> And don’t over use viz. [...] I don't fully agree with this neither. Especially for mathematical concepts, visualization can give insight into how theorems are constructed and combined. This can prove to be vital when applying concepts and theorems to new problems. I would especially like to bring forth 3blue1brown[1]. He is a creator of videos which beautifully visualizes and explains complex mathematical problems. His efforts has given me an insight into math which theorems explained in text and variables could never do. However I do see your point that visualizations without understanding can be misleading. Hence the pure, written math is important to read and reason about, but I do believe that some concepts need to be visualized to be fully understood. [1]: http://www.3blue1brown.com http://www.3blue1brown.com
biswaroop 9y ago
I think what he/she means is poorly designed visualizations. Just because a plot is grayscale and not interactive doesn't mean it's worse than a cluttered poorly-designed super interactive web widget. It's a poor choice of wording, but I think by "overuse" they might mean "unclear but eye-catching". Besides "overuse" is literally the quantity that is excessive.
gesman 9y ago
Good viz is what connects non-ML/AI users to the "magical" results of ML/AI

by p33p 9y ago

barskern 9y ago

> And don’t over use viz. [...] I don't fully agree with this neither. Especially for mathematical concepts, visualization can give insight into how theorems are constructed and combined. This can prove to be vital when applying concepts and theorems to new problems. I would especially like to bring forth 3blue1brown[1]. He is a creator of videos which beautifully visualizes and explains complex mathematical problems. His efforts has given me an insight into math which theorems explained in text and variables could never do. However I do see your point that visualizations without understanding can be misleading. Hence the pure, written math is important to read and reason about, but I do believe that some concepts need to be visualized to be fully understood. [1]: http://www.3blue1brown.com http://www.3blue1brown.com

biswaroop 9y ago

I think what he/she means is poorly designed visualizations. Just because a plot is grayscale and not interactive doesn't mean it's worse than a cluttered poorly-designed super interactive web widget. It's a poor choice of wording, but I think by "overuse" they might mean "unclear but eye-catching". Besides "overuse" is literally the quantity that is excessive.

gesman 9y ago

Good viz is what connects non-ML/AI users to the "magical" results of ML/AI