If a presentation of the data that conforms to standard techniques for an unbiased representation would not result in “hitting you in the gut” then that has to be accepted, and worked with, not sacrificing intellectual integrity to elide the data and change things for an agenda.
What's going to be your opinion of the value of my fund? Of me? Did I do anything wrong, or can I just claim I was only trying to "appeal to the audience's emotion"? Myopic thinking and Machiavellian logic are a great combination to undermine the very ends you aim to achieve.
In the case we're talking about, the emotional impact intended is simply that the information is alarming. You can drily say "the house is on fire", or with flushed face and wide eyes exclaim "the house is on fire!" The latter involves emotional information in addition to the relevant facts. If the house is not on fire, both statements have the same problem: they are false. If the house is on fire, the second is more likely to prompt action. The absence of emotional cues in the first statement will itself be taken as an emotional cue by an ordinary audience. "The house can't be on fire in the way I would normally interpret 'the house is on fire' because that would cause panic, and the speaker isn't panicking. Ho, hum. Are there any sports on?" In fact, the dryness of the presentation is frequently presented as evidence that climate change is a fraud. Denialists say "if you really believed this is true, you'd be doing X, and you aren't, so ha!" The beauty of this gambit is that the goal posts are so mobile. If you do X, they pull secret expected behavior Y out of their pocket and repeat the argument. These measures of sincere affect are like sharks teeth. There is always another if you pull out the one you see. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. So, setting aside these particular denialists as insincere, one's best bet is to try to indicate your affect in your presentation, because this is a heuristic ordinary people use to gauge the honesty of their interlocutors: does the implied urgency of their argument match their tone.
If you genuinely think you're right, you don't suddenly turn to something very much bordering on falsehoods to make a point. In any discussion the strength of an argument is generally going to be measured based on the strength of its weakest point. And arguments, such as this article presents, are incredibly weak as they appear to be deeply misleading when one is presented with big picture data. And suddenly everything you've ever said becomes tainted, even if the other 99% of it was completely and wholly accurate.
[1] - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Global_te...
Instead, like on so many topics in the social media era, people 'pick sides' and radicalize on these issues. And media like this is published to help further the radicalization. All the while in this process people on both 'sides' ends up voluntarily retarding their own logic and reasoning by working backwards from a predetermined conclusion instead of working from the breadth of data towards whichever conclusion (or lack thereof) that they find the most logical position.
My point precisely.
> Personally, I think that people are very skilled at identifying when they are being spoken to unhonestly or dismissively.
How? By consulting their gut? Why do certain people lie so frequently if lying doesn't work?
Besides, we aren't talking about lying here, only presenting true data such that it has a particular emotional appeal. The goal is not to produce any false belief or any action contrary to the audience's interest. It is only to get the audience to register the information with the organ they use to process such information effectively: their gut.
But really the point I was trying to make by saying it's just another sentiment: perhaps the number of people put off by incomplete statistics is more than the people swayed by the dramatic results