Calling Bullshit 6.6: The Principle of Proportional Ink

Our principle of proportional ink states that when a shaded region is used to represent a numerical value, the area of that shaded region should be directly proportional to the corresponding value. We look at graphs that violate this principle and discuss how such violations can be misleading. This example is treated in further detail in one of our callingbullshit.org articles: callingbullshit.org/tools/tool...
May 3, 2017
Course: INFO 198 / BIOL 106B. University of Washington
Instructors: Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West
Synopsis: Our world is saturated with bullshit. Learn to detect and defuse it.
The course will be offered as a 1-credit seminar this spring through the Information School at the University of Washington. We aim to expand it to a 3 or 4 credit course for 2017-2018. For those who cannot attend in person, we aim to videotape the lectures this spring and make video clips freely available on the web.
callingbullshit.org
/ callin_bull
callinBS
[e-mail]
Information School ischool.uw.edu/
Department of Biology www.biology.washington.edu/
Video edited by Bum Mook Oh
Music by Chris Zabriskie: Prelude No.7

[@havenbastion]

Proportional ink in relation to perspective isn't necessarily a problem, because the brain automatically accommodates perspective to an extent. More important is that the axis lines up for bar charts and the actual face of the chart proportions are accurate.

[@niclasblomberg7303]

The 'Search Engine Market Share' also adds up to more than 100 xD

[@federicoruysch]

I think the principle of proportional ink breaks down with proportions or percentages, related to the logistic function. An increase from 98% to 99% is far more notable than an increase between 50% to 51%. That's because we're not dealing with unbounded intervals. There cannot be nothing above 100 and nothing below 0. The principle of proportional ink would make sense in the logit space. Especially when dealing with accuracies, improvements over high scores are more important and deserves to be highlighted more than improvements over lower scores.

[@pixelpulse0755]

"There's some horrifying information in this graph. For example, more than twice as many people has read The daVinci Code as The Diary of Anne Frank. The designer did not want us to live in a world like that."

[@owlnyc666]

Which designer and how do you know what it wants?😉

[@HighMansx]

Another possible issue with the book graph is that most of the books presented are nowhere near as old as the Holy Bible -- correct?

[@josephdavis3472]

Yeah, and there weren't angry mobs running around in 2004 saying "convert to Potterism or die".

[@AF-jp5vi]

The bar chart shows number of copies printed and sold over the past 50 years, so the problem is that some of these books are younger than 50 years. If all books shown in the bar chart were at least 50 years old, there wouldn't be any problem.

[@owlnyc666]

The one percent pays thirty nine percent of takes!!! 🤔🤔🤔

[@clemensfrede1338]

While I love the course, I found this lecture to be particularly weak. Personal preferences about 3d pie charts are all fine, but hardly convincing. Presenting information in flat, dull bar graphs may be fine for academic publications, but will likely but the general magazine-reader to sleep. Would’ve liked to see some good examples of presenting data in a visually engaging way.