re: #168 Welcome to The Imbleachment (dangerman)

There’s a saying in Science! — “torture the data until it confesses.” Chartology is one of those Dark Secrets taught in the shadowy corners of scientific academia to up and coming Lobachevskis, masterful methods of psychological manipulation by cherrypicking data sets, subtle use of colour in lines, “missing” axis labels and offset axes, unsubstantiated best-fit lines and, best of all, the unjustified extrapolation aka a trend.

“Give me three points of data and I’ll fit them to any curve you like. Four and I can make it a cardoid.”

Basically these sorts of charts are not intended to inform, they’re intended to excite and enrage. I try not to let myself get enraged by this sort of manipulation (the raw data is bad enough as it is).