Chart-crime is an offshoot of lying with statistics. Most people who look at charts don’t even look at the two axes, which makes chart-crime pretty easy to commit. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
if a picture is worth 1000 words, imagine how many lies it can tell
the key to engendering a sense of crisis is to remove any sense of perspective. it’s a classic of the genre. “risk is up 50%!” is this a big deal? without a baseline risk figure, you really cannot say. a 50% rise in your risk of getting cancer would probably lead you to reconsider behavior. a 50% rise in risk of being hit my a meteorite? probably not.
this was used to great effect by the covid crowd with claims like “50% reduction in deaths” from vaccines or from other drugs. leaving aside the frequent inaccuracy, rigging, and even falsification of such data: it’s still incredibly misleading. a 50% drop from what? if your prior death risk was 1 in 10,000, halving it is pretty immaterial and even tiny adverse events rates would swamp benefit and lead to negative expected value. but it was presented in a manner that made this hard to see. and let me tell you, if you think the drug cos and health agencies are good at misrepresentation, well buckle up, because they are absolute pikers compared to the climate crowd…
i’m not going to get into the quality of the data here. i have done so in some other places like THIS and the issues with the temperature datasets both running increasingly hot due to bad siting and calibration from bad terrestrial data and the stubborn refusal of the USHCN climate reference network to confirm the rise certainly lead to fertile grounds for debate there, but for now, let’s focus solely upon presentation and allow a gato to play the penn and teller and show you how the trick is done.
