Using something that’s factually true but superficially misleading with the deliberate intent to mislead is a classic form of bullshitting. It’s the so-called “axis change” technique among misleading graph methods.
The NYTimes piece linked, if it’s the same one I read, has itself a link to Maddow complaining that Politifact is bad at their job, to show that they’re not partisan Democrats [del](just bad at their job).[/del]
What about “related to studies,” or do student athletes suddenly not need to worry about that?
Quick! Someone alert doorhinge!
I think there was an illustration exactly like this one, in the classic text, “How to Lie With Statistics”. Two charts side by side, one labelled “Payrolls Remain Stable!” and one “Payrolls Up!” Same numbers, different scale on the Y-axis.
My favorite part is how tacked on the -5 and -10 are. We can make this BIGGER!
Yes, but the article is stupid. If the legislature strips scholarships from athletes for speaking out, that’s a First Amendment violation. Stripping scholarships from athletes for refusing to play is clearly not; the act may be symbolic, but it’s not the symbolism that is being punished. Put another way, you cannot constitutionally be penalized for burning a flag, but you can still be penalized for breaking the municipal fire code.
Thanks for the Wiki link. This is a topic I discuss when I teach charts in Excel, so I’ll include it next semester. I show plenty of Fox News charts, and just added the House committee chart on Planned Parenthood. I got many misleading charts from Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Data.
For completeness sake, does anyone have the raw data from which the chart was derived? I’d like to see it scaled from 50 to 70F to show my students the difference.
To make it smaller!
Somebody twitted it back at them. I managed to track the image to here, which points to the Earth Policy Institute. I think that’s the dataset, there’s also one in Celsius if you’re teaching in a sane country.
Scalia is an asshat, and I will not shed a tear for him if he dies in office and Obama or Clinton gets to replace him. But it does annoy me that it is on one of the rare instances that he says something that is absolutely correct that the outrage meter goes up to infinity.
Do you have to wonder why? He’s essentially repeating that long-debunked Bell Curve crap.
Nope. Did you actually read what he said?
Now you know how I feel as a supporter of the Citizens United decision.
Almost nobody has.
And it’s not even clear yet whether he was saying it or merely discussing what someone else had said.
Instead of being coy, I will spell it out. He was not saying that black people were inherently incapable of meeting the rigorous admission standards for UT. He was questioning, as I and other reasonable people question, the wisdom of waiving those standards to increase African-American enrollment beyond that which would be attained by admitting everyone based on objective academic standards. Everything he said would also be consistent with the assumption that letting in a less qualified white applicant through a side door could also get them into academic trouble and ultimately not be beneficial to them. But this case is about letting in less qualified African-American applicants.
Now, maybe my even saying that would be controversial, in which case we are seriously getting into Orwellian territory. There is no disputing the fact that this program does exactly that: lets in black applicants who do not meet the standards that white or Asian applicants must meet to be admitted. This is just a fact.
The only questions are whether that is good for the people being admitted, and/or whether it is fair to those white or Asian applicants who lose their spots as a result. It is possible for it to be good for those who get the preference and unfair to those who do not; or for it to be good for the first group and not especially unfair to the second; I don’t see how it is possible for it to be bad for the group they are trying to help, yet still be a good idea overall.
P.S. I support the Citizens United decision as well, even though I very much dislike the Citizens United group and what they stand for. For me it is about civil liberties, and no different from my support of the right for Nazis to march in Skokie Illinois.
Ugh. Illinois nazis.
Here’s the thing though … I don’t buy the “it’s just a fact,” portion of that post. Affirmative Action programs are designed to tip the scales toward *qualified *minority applicants, not just any random black person who applies. I don’t buy the whole, “this qualified white guy didn’t get in so the black person who did get in must not be qualified,” thing.
On the other hand, I don’t hear much bitching and moaning about athletic scholarships, which fucking clearly admit under-qualified students to prestigious colleges and universities. More money in football Saturdays than library Tuesdays, I suppose.
No inconsistency on my part. I think athletics should be taken out of universities altogether except as intramural activities.
As for your other claims:
Ben Carson’s sure-fire guaranteed plan to destroy ISIS.
I like how he only wants Sunnis in his army.