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shmerham t1_izg5udz wrote

Reply to comment by dark_o3 in [OC] How to spot misleading charts? I would like to hear your opinion on the subject, also any tips design-wise? by dark_o3

I’m not sure I’d agree that 1 is not ok in most instances. It’s okay if you’re comparing values against a reference, particularly if you’re trying to show outliers.

Take, for example, 100 meter dash times. There’s a huge difference between 10.0 and 9.9 seconds (a body length). …and if you’re trying to compare Usain Bolt’s record against the other fastest times, you would need to truncate the axis to see that his fastest stands out against the next 9 fastest runners which are clustered together.

There just one example but there’s plenty of others.

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[deleted] t1_izg74y0 wrote

[deleted]

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shmerham t1_izggf1c wrote

I agree with you and those scenarios are probably more common, but it seems like it would be incredibly hard to quantify that, so it’s susceptible to cognitive biases.

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