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0 pointszdragnar4y ago0 comments

Charts and visualisations are a great way to trick people. Not only is the source data obscured (and so readily cherry picked) but it opens up all sorts of tricks around visual perception.

I also suspect most people yet to be convinced will immediately think back to Al Gore's infamous hockey stick chart when presented with visual simplifications of deeply complex climate data.

At the heart of the matter, looking at such a chart isn't meant to inform you, it is meant to elicit an emotional response, and they have been trained to respond with skepticism.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

SiempreViernes4y ago· 1 in thread

Surely you mean the infamous lies about the Mann 1999 "hockey stick"? The Mann 1999 results are correct (see for instance https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5505119/figure/... for confirmation) and the graph doesn't do anything more nefarious than the plot summaries you'll see in imdb: it summarises a complicated thing.

zdragnarOP4y ago

The results are only verified correct for the recent past (for which we already have data for from actual, rather than proxy readings) but even the NAS committee concluded that from 900-1600 they had only mild confidence in the method, and before that very little.

DangitBobby4y ago

They have been trained to deny evidence that leads to conclusions they don't like.

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