Reader Umlud pointed out this presentation by Alex Lundry on Andrew Sullivan’s webpage on the potential dangers of graphics, particularly when used in political debates:
As a side note, though, when you encounter an Angry Mob, I’m not sure pointing out flaws in their graphics is your best plan.
It’s not Andrew Sullivan. It’s right-wing pollster Alex Lundry.
… sorry… not to pick a nit, but I saw the video on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. However, he isn’t the one in the video.
The person presenting the video is Alex Lundry.
also, while I don’t agree with his politics, I do think that what he points out here is interesting.
Ah, fixed. And don’t know why I managed to make it post earlier than other posts, but oh well.
A fantastic representation of how the effectiveness of statistics has much to do with the way they are presented.
[...] to Sociological Images and Diane [...]
cool presentation.
This was awesome. I’d really like to check out the website he mentioned, but I can’t figure out exactly what he’s saying. Does anyone know?
Remarkable. I had no idea this fellow was a right-wing before reading these comments. Had you asked me, I would have guessed left, especially given that he mocks right-wing protesters throughout the presentation.
In any case, very cool.
Thanks for posting the video and glad everyone enjoyed it. I tried to be as neutral and non-partisan as possible for the presentation as my point was an inherently partisan-free one: we are going to see more dataviz used as political messaging vehicles, so let’s be sure we all have some graphical literacy in order to separate the wheat from the chaff.
@Fangirl The website I mentioned is http://SCOTUSscores.com – a visualization I did of the ideological history of the Supreme Court.
- Alex
FYI – the chart he included about global warming/pirates that he uses as an example of correlation vs causation was created for that very purpose. Please see the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster link below. While Mr. Lundry is certainly free to dictate the content of his speech and visuals, he loses credibility when he tries to pass off a spoofy, sarcastic graph as an example of a flawed chart. Fact checking is your friend.
http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/
RAmen
@RAmen – thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately it’s hard to see in the video, but the slide with the global warming/pirates chart does indeed have a citation to venganza.org. I certainly never intended to pass it off as anything other than a spoofy, sarcastic chart, and my apologies if anyone thought otherwise. Indeed, an original draft of my script had me calling this a “tongue in cheek chart” but sadly the Ignite format limits you to 15 seconds per slide and, thinking my audience was smart enough to see it as the parody it is, I cut that line from the script.
- Alex
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