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Comment by magnio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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