How Charts Lie Quotes

“Rationalization is a dialogue with ourselves or with like-minded brains. Reasoning, on the other hand, is an honest and open conversation in which we try to persuade interlocutors who don't necessarily agree with us beforehand with arguments that are as universally valid, coherent, and detailed as possible, while opening ourselves to persuasion.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“The lesson we learn from Nightingale's experience is that, as painful as it may sound, we humans are barely able to reason on our own or when surrounded by like-minded people. When we try to reason this way, we end up rationalizing because we use arguments as self-reinforcing virtue signals. And the worst news is that the more intelligent we are and the more information we have access to, the more successful our rationalizations are. This is in part because we're more aware of what the members of the groups -- political parties, churches, and others -- that we belong to think, and we try to align with them. On the other hand, if you are exposed to an opinion and don't know where the opinion comes from, you're more likely to think about it on its merits.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“Any chart, no matter how well designed, will mislead us if we don’t pay attention to it.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“The world cannot be understood without numbers.
And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“groups already hold them, or because we feel emotionally good about them—and then we use our thinking skills to justify those beliefs, persuade others of their merits, and defend ourselves against other people’s contradicting beliefs.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“whereas confirmation bias is an automatic tendency to notice data that fit with our beliefs, motivated reasoning is the complementary tendency to scrutinize ideas more carefully if we don’t like them than if we do.”10”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“The more we cherish an idea, the more we’ll love any chart that corroborates it, no matter how simplistic that chart is.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“Perhaps it's time for this principle of verification to stop being just a journalistic ethical mandate and become instead a civic responsibility -- the responsibility to assess whether what we share publicly looks and sounds right, if only to preserve the quality of our information ecosystems and public discourse. We know intuitively that we ought to use hammers responsibly -- to build, not to destroy. We ought to begin thinking about other technologies such as charts and social media in the same way so instead of being part of the misinformation and disinformation malady that currently ails us, we become part of society's immune system.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“A good chart widens our imagination and enhances our understanding by providing insights from numbers.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“The best antidote to a misguided belief is not just truthful information. Instead, it is doubt and uncertainty, cracks in the edifice of belief through which truthful information can later leak in.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“This thoroughness in the presentation of information is what distinguishes information from propaganda. Propaganda is information presented in a simplistic manner with the intention of shaping public opinion, highlighting what the propagandist believes strengthens his or her case and omitting what may refute it.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“In the same way that we shouldn’t automatically believe a chart before reading it carefully, neither should we rush to call a chart a lie before we think about what it was designed for.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“Chart design, like writing, is as much a science as it is an art.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“Well-designed charts are empowering. They enable conversations. They imbue us with X-ray vision, allowing us to peek through the complexity of large amounts of data. Charts are often the best way to reveal patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

“Freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.”
― Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information