🫧🎬 The best stats you've ever seen

Hale Winter played this in 🎓 Lecture 2 - Describing data without lying, standing beside the screen in his cardigan with the remote held like a conductor's baton. A Swedish professor of global health, on a stage in 2006, with twenty minutes and a chart that moves. I watched it again at home the same night with the sound up, which is the right way.

What happens in it

• He starts with a test he gave his own students, pairs of countries and which has the higher child mortality. They did worse than guessing. His conclusion is not that they knew nothing: it is that they knew something out of date and were sure of it.
• Then the chart. Every country is a bubble, family size along the bottom, life expectancy up the side, and he presses play on forty years. The two clumps everybody carries in their head, us and them, slide into one.
• Then he takes one bubble apart. An average for a whole region hides countries as far apart as the regions were. Then a country hides its own richest and poorest fifth.
• He finishes by asking for publicly funded data to be let out of its databases, searchable and free.

What I took

• An average is a place where nobody lives. I have said show me Tuesday at work for a year. This is the same sentence with better graphics.
• Motion is an argument. The chart does not prove anything a table could not, but nobody has ever gasped at a table.
• He commentates like a horse race. The delight is doing work: I remembered the numbers.

It is why 🧭 Five questions to ask a chart has compared with what in the middle of it. Filed under 00. Statistics for Product Decisions I Hub.

Shown by: Hale Winter, lecture 2