Title: How to Get Better at Embracing Unknowns
Context: There are a million ways to visualize data. Maybe it’s time we stop using pie charts for 999,999,999 of them.
Synopsis: We live in the age of big data where no decision is made without collecting, sorting, analyzing, and ultimately making an utter mess out of the information we have at hand. Understanding vast collections of statistics are all but impossible for the human mind. We aren’t wired that way. Our strengths lie in generalization and pattern recognition. In other words: spare the details and give us the summary so we can make some informed decisions. Spreadsheets are meaningless, but bar charts seem to make sense. Reams of facts and figures make our brains hurt, but a fancy pants, multi-colored quantile dot plot? Now you’ve got our attention. Of course, this means that the methods of rendering data need to be accurate and, more importantly, understandable, but that’s not always easy. We should spend almost as much time figuring out how to meaningfully communicate data as we do figuring out how to get ever greater quantities of it.
Best Bit: “The least effective way to present uncertainty is to not show it at all.”
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