Using Dashboards For Good or Evil: The Misrepresentation of Data
From the post:
“Making an evidence presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell. Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and a moral activity.” – Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence
You may think to yourself, how on Earth could dashboards be used for good or evil? Or you already know and you’re simply humoring us by reading this. Aside from the obvious, using it to measure how many evil things you’ve done (evil success vs. evil failures), there is the less obvious way in which you misrepresent the data you are displaying. The power that data visualization has to augment cognition can also be used, unfortunately, to distort reality.
You really need to read this post with the next one which concerns a post by John D. Cook.
The arrogance that I find in this post is the assumption that “good deed doers” can discern “reality” for all of us and spot “distortions” of that reality.
No doubt, data has representations and you should ask questions when data is presented to you. To say nothing of when you are tailoring a data presentation for a client.
But to assume the mantle of moral censor of data presentations seems to go a bit far. Does that qualify as arrogance?