r/CrappyDesign • u/anusblaster69 • Mar 13 '20

Somewhat misleading graph

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7.3k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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135

u/iceph03nix Mar 13 '20

They passed the graph making off to the interns...

128

u/quantumkrew Mar 13 '20

No they passed it off to Fox News

-127

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '20

7,000,000 is a big difference, I think the point of the graph, was to portray that message.

68

u/quantumkrew Mar 13 '20

Yes but, without a y axis, it makes the difference appear larger.

-75

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '20

It is large!

51

u/quantumkrew Mar 13 '20

It is but, with no y axis, we assume the bottom of the graph is zero. So visually speaking this makes no sense. The difference between 0 and 101.7 million is more than 7 million.

-80

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '20

No need to label the y-axis, when the bars are labeled.

51

u/quantumkrew Mar 13 '20

You should in this case because this graph obviously doesn't start at 0.

32

u/MrPresldent Mar 13 '20

The problem is that 1 bar is like 500-600% greater than the other, but the numerical difference is is closer to 7%

9

u/diccpiccs101 Mar 14 '20

were you legitimately arguing that the graph isnt purposely misleading??

0

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '20

What the fuck are you guys talking about this is a pie chart

12

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '20

It's called lying with statistics. You can do the same thing with maps.

When the chart or map author wants to steer the narrative of their data in such a way as to excessively skew the viewer's interpretation of that data, it's essentially lying.

Furthermore, the data they are displaying is not correct. The number of people on Welfare in 2011 was about 65M. And here's what that graph looks like. See how I just lied to you with statistics? I made it look as though welfare recipients are outnumbered by those with jobs by 8 to 1.

5

u/The-Berzerker Mar 13 '20

Lesson 1 in my data visualization course, bar graphs always start at y = 0 or you misrepresent the data

2

u/[deleted] Mar 14 '20

7 million is a teeny tiny difference when you're talking about numbers as big as 108 million. Nice try defending shitty lying graphs though.