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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I'm shocked at the awful quality of comments here. This is a clear and straightforward article laying out the issues with box plots and appropriate alternatives, from a professional who works in the field and spends his life explaining these.

And still half the comments are like "But I know better!"... yeah, I'd wager most here don't.

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I'm qualified in maths related computing and statistics to exam invigilator level, if that helps offset your bias.

No bias -- By commenting a lot, you're overrepresenting the average HN audience. Which kind of nullifies your point, doesn't it?

You argue in other comments that it's just an education problem, but box plots are used with people who don't have this exact education you mention, and the article explains that a drawback of box plots is exactly that it isn't intuitive and takes several minutes of explanations.

In other words, the article says "I've stopped using this because they require education", and your retort is "Don't stop using these, you just need to educate people".

That background would make you explicitly unqualified to asses the quality of box plots as a visualization method. Box plots are used throughout various fields of research that are far less mathematical in nature.

Rubbish. They're used extensively in probability statistics and confidence intervals. Field of research has bugger all to do with it :tears:

You not understanding what my comment means is incredibly thematic.

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