Escape the Echo Chamber!
Escape the Echo Chamber!
Whether it’s reporting on the presidential debate in the US, or 9/11 retrospectives, or political or other news from your area, a bit of wisdom I’ve received is it's important to:
a) look at alternate sources of information/analysis, and b) understand how our biases help shape our understanding of information.
In particular, when it comes to graphs and charts!
I subscribe to a newsletter called The Browser (https://thebrowser.com/?via=thebrowser&ref=the-browser-newsletter), which sends me three to four terrific pieces of writing every day, as well as a video, a podcast, and a daily quote.
Yesterday, with everything above in mind, they sent a piece headlined “On Fables and Nuanced Charts.”
Did you know that there’s a book that dates back to 1954 called “How To Lie With Statistics?” The information in that book has been used by everyone, from politicians to drug companies, to mislead us for decades. Charts and graphs are their favorite way of manipulating information.
That misinformation contains just enough truth to look credible, but it’s almost always guilty of oversimplifying and omitting crucial data or context (often unintentionally but often with malign intent).
In any case, the article in question can be found here: https://www.asimov.press/p/charts?ref=thebrowser.com.
This article is an eye-opening read if you’ve ever bought a chart as an evident truth because it confirms your worldview. It helps give the “why” behind the notion that you should question everything and look for corroborative or alternate sources of material on the same subject that are comfortable citing sources. And of course, that those sources are credible.
Happy reading!