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Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

No you shouldn’t stop using box plots. You should use them for when they are appropriate - showing location and spread. And not shape! There’s absolutely no information on modality or distribution presented past quartiles and limits.

They are mostly useful for comparing batches not analysing an individual batch.

The author doesn’t know what they are talking about and is telling people as if they do. If he read any of Tukey’s material he might know. But no name dropping is enough clearly…

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You are looking at this as a technical problem, where box plot is a compact visual representation of variance and outliers that is perfectly perfunctory as it is cromulent.

The author is approaching this as a human problem. Plots are not made for machines, they are for people to read, and the author specifically wants as many people can read and parse plots easily as possible. As lamentable as math education might be, we have to work with what we have, and I do think it is a reasonable goal. I agree with the author that it should not be necessary to know what quartiles are in order to see how spread out a distribution is.

So your approach and the author’s is to dumb a technical measure down to a level where the observer doesn’t need to understand what they are looking at.

Well that explains the entire data visualisation and dashboard consultancy nicely.

How does anyone rationalise the information they have if they don’t make an effort to understand it. Or how can they even select a visualisation method or comparison method. We are truly fucked!

> So your approach and the author’s is to dumb a technical measure down to a level where the observer doesn’t need to understand what they are looking at.

this is precisely why i don't bother with capitalization in my sentences.

in fact even punctuation isnt necessary i dont see why i should dumb down my explanations for people who arent going to make an effort to understand them

actuallyevenspacesaresimplyredundantandasufficientlysmartreadershouldjustunderstandmymeaningwithoutmeneedingtodelineatemywordswhataretheyachildifthiswasgoodenoughfortheancientromansthenitsgoodenoughforme

hckvnvwlsrrdndntndfnynsysthrwsthnmycnclsnsthtthrbrnsrnsffcntlylrgtcmprhndmygns

Do you want to be right, or do you want to be understood?

You can’t control what other people do. You can try to meet them where they are, or hope they’ll catch up with you. Hopefully it’s not your problem if they fail to.

> No you shouldn’t stop using box plots. You should use them for when they are appropriate

Yes, the author is aware of that. They even stated so:

> Despite making more visual sense than box plots, I still wouldn’t recommend these design concepts or box plots in most situations because…

Seems a few people missed the "in most situations" part. He's saying he stopped using them for whatever reasons because it isn't working for his audience. So as the title suggests, maybe we should all take a look at our use of box plots and see if there are better alternatives.

Also remember who he's talking about when it comes to reading box plots. He's not talking about people who understand box plots. He's talking about others that don't know or understand box plots, which seems to be thousands of people he's had to explain it to, according to him.

The author doesn't use the correct terminology and does not understand box plots themselves so they are in no position to explain them to anyone. They explain in terms of absolutes with no rational or scientific explanation and entirely miss the point of the methodology and tools. That is a not a good position to start or a good person to take advice from.

Not only that, the cases presented are likely better dealt with via inference tests. But the author's knowledge doesn't extend that far. And even going as far left, the posed question isn't even defined in the article. So how was a suitable methodology chosen? Well it wasn't - lets just throw this pretty picture up and whine about it.

The author is way out of their depth and should retract the article and take a formal, accredited statistics course.

Is this sarcasm?

I'm not one to appeal to authority but "author should take a course" is akin to ad hominem when a quick look at their profile (https://www.practicalreporting.com/about-nick-desbarats - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickdesbarats/) tells you that he's been doing dataviz and statistics for a long time.

Nope.

I'm not one to appeal to authority either which is why I am making objective arguments about what is presented.

And yes he should go on a stats course. I dread to think the chaos he’s spread to people who don’t know better.

I fully agree that appeals to authority should be ignored. My profile has nothing to do with how right or wrong I might be.

Ad hominem arguments, however, should also be ignored. Saying that I'm unqualified doesn't prove anything and adds nothing to the discussion.

If you have specific criticisms of my reasoning, I'm more than happy to listen. If all you have are personal insults, however, well, enjoy the rest of your day.

> The author is way out of their depth and should retract the article and take a formal, accredited statistics course.

Maybe you should learn about the author before you make such assumptions. I find it hilarious you think he should take statistics courses when he teaches data visualization workshops to places like NASA, IRS, and the UN.

I'm done with this thread. Such a joke.

Oh I know the author.

Just because you’re high profile in the data viz industry doesn’t mean you should be commenting on statistics especially with such a clear misunderstanding going on.

Some of us are definitely more qualified to speak on these matters and we still don’t think we’re qualified to teach it.

If box plots require an formal and accredited statistics course to understand, but as you mention they are taught to 15 year olds (presumably incorrectly) in school and used by people with power making decisions that affect everyone in organisations such as the UN and NASA, then even if the author is unqualified it seems their point is 'accidentally' correct. No one should be using these plots except extremely smart and trained people who do know how to read them, as it could have serious negative consequences.

I do stats and data viz for a living and the article seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

He isn’t dogmatic.

He makes reasonable arguments.

I’m confused by these hopelessly uncharitable readings of the article.

I naively assumed that ten years of teaching data visualization at NASA, Yale, Visa, the U.N., UofT, etc. would qualify me to write about something like this, but I guess not. Thanks for setting me straight :-) BTW, what terminology was I using incorrectly?

To clarify, I (article author) am not aware of any scenarios in which a box plot would be a better choice than simpler chart types, even for very sophisticated audiences. From the article:

"Other reviewers suggested that the conclusion [of this article] should be that box plots are a useful chart type, but only for statistically savvy audiences. Again, I’m going a step further, suggesting that even those audiences would be better served by other chart types in virtually all situations."

You absolutely should stop using box plots. The only reason to use them is because you have to draw a representation by hand and do not have access to a computer.

A box plot is a data compression technique for compression by hand. There are now better automated techniques that both preserve data quality and visual quality better.

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