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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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CanadaBC is leaving Twitter due to its tweets carrying the label "government-funded Media". This is particularly suprising, as unlike BritishBC or NipponHK, which are given government monopolies, but don't get money directly from the fiscus, CBC does. The Canadian state budget has an explicit provision that appropriates money appropriated from Canadian taxpayers to CBC.

The CBC on its own website even admits this fact in what might be the most misleading graph I have ever seen. If one isn't careful to look closely at the Y axis, one might miss that numbers from $700m to $1700m are omitted, thus making the 71.2% of the 2018/2019 budget which was given to it by the state, appear more 40%.

Both of these facts (objecting to being labeled GFM and the deceptive graph) point to CBC apparently thinking getting funds from the fiscus isn't a "good luck", thus it seeks play down this fact, by hook or by crook.

But why? Why would it be more shameful for a newsources sources of money be decided representatively democratically, where each person rich or poor has approximatelly the same weight, than if it were owned by a billionaire like Bezos?

might be the most misleading graph I have ever seen

I urge folks to take a look at this graph. Peak comedy.

Wow yeah, that's good enough to be one of the example graphs in "How to Lie with Statistics".

Masterpiece of a stacked bar chart.

Look at that subtle axis breakage, the tasteful placement of it. Oh my god, components are even split out into different columns.

The AI-art naysayers are right; there’s no way AI can generate art with this much soul and creativity.

Really gives the impression of an organization doing its level best to be transparent and honest. Can you imagine still questioning their integrity after looking at that?

I wonder if the government told them to hush up their involvement, or if it just seemed like the obvious choice.

This is one of the worst graphs I’ve ever seen.

Not only is it wildly misleading, it’s a perversion of the concept of a bar graph! The adjacent columns don’t compare data, they just break it out into components. I assume the creator chose this because he couldn’t make a pie chart that cheats so hard.

There are only five pieces of information on each chart. We’re approaching Pravda levels. Tufte must be spinning in his—wait, he’s still alive. He should be informed of this tragedy, but sending this graph might be considered harassment.

I assume the creator chose this because he couldn’t make a pie chart that cheats so hard.

I can't recall where I saw it, but I saw some newspaper clipping a while back that just straight-up had no correlation between the pie chart size and the percentage. With subtle manipulation, this would be hard to detect and could even be plausibly denied as intentional manipulation rather than carelessness, but this one, IIRC, had a sliver with a number greater than 50% over a slice whose arc was clearly under 180 degrees. It certainly made me more careful about paying close attention to every part of a chart and their correlation to the underlying data whenever I encountered a chart in some article. Which kind of defeats the purpose of charts, but what can you do.

The fixed version highlights the absurdity of the original: https://twitter.com/politicalmath/status/1648299180945801218

This is some Lib Dem Bar Charts level nonsense, wow. There's lying with statistics and then there's this.

Lib Dem Bar Charts

Wild. My go-to was always DefenseCharts, but that’s a much better example for actual numeric nonsense.

At this point, I think that the smarter Lib Dems use bar graphs simply to amuse and catch the attention of sad and overly political nerds, who are one of the groups who will still consider voting for them. It's self-parody that only the people who like proportional representation will understand, or at least I hope it's self-parody...

sad and overly political nerds

This comment is too boo outgroup and antagonistic.

As a long-term Liberal Democrat and statistics geek, I resent this aggressive moderation of a factually accurate. After three or more pints of Real Ale (20 oz pints - we're British) the finer points of the Single Transferable Vote and Site Value Rating are quite exquisitely interesting to sad and overly political nerds such as myself.

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