I'd venture further to say it's a perversion of "news" for a news site to be injecting garbage into the data for entertainment purposes.
It's only misleading developers, who will think that data is being streamed rather than fetched once. Other than that it's a clever (and yes, entertaining) way of displaying margins of error.
Can I offer that, of all the things in news and dataviz to shit on, this isn't one of them? I mean, really, an "abuse of our attention" - what?
Only a dev would think about the possibility of a statistical model updated with a second(s) granularity.
And be disappointed (I was) that it's actually just updated every few minutes with a fetched JSON file, rather than some fancy instant updates pushed down via a websocket connection. :D
In this case, a better solution would be a blurred needle.
It is well known that multi-tasking and context switching has a cost. The same applies to movements on visualizations.
One can convey mean and standard deviation without animation.
When something moves, the way it moves catches the eye. Arbitrary movement is wasted movement when it comes to conveying real information.
Take electron orbital clouds [1]. They are a nice way to show uncertainty with a static image and without animation. Indeed, an animation of an electron moving around would not the tell the story as effectively. A blurred probability cloud is a better way to do it to tell the story of probability.
Also, a blurred cloud is useful precisely because it does not imply that electrons follow predictable paths.
[1]: http://www.scottsmithonline.com/interests/medicalschool/biol...
No dispute that it's clever and entertaining. These are undesirable qualities in a reliable source of information.
Can you imagine reading a scientific journal in which the data narrative was deliberately engineered to keep you guessing until the conclusion? You would be right to raise eyebrows at a publication that is investing in your attention rather than its own accuracy.
There's no dire consequence here, it's just slightly dystopian that US presidential elections are unapologetically leveraged as a vehicle for mass entertainment by the press itself.
HN is so incredibly cynical sometimes. How are "clever and entertaining" undesirable qualities in reliable source of information? The only requirement in a reliable source of information is reliability. "Entertaining" is very much a desirable quality if you actually want people to care about said reliable information.
My argument is that jitter doesn't make it unreliable as it's simply a visualization of the uncertainty. So if it gets people interested and doesn't do it inaccurately, that's a win in my book.
You would be right to raise eyebrows at a publication that is investing in your attention rather than its own accuracy
Por que no los dos? One doesn't conflict with the other.
> unapologetically leveraged as a vehicle for mass entertainment
Sorry America, you turned those elections into mass entertainment all by yourself ;)
You can see similar issues with most purely mechanical dials to one degree or another when they are responding to a rapid change.
Of course they aren't going to get it fixed tonight if that is what you are thinking.