this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Using compressed axes to display data was literally "How to identify misleading statistics 101" in middle school for us....
It seems fine to you but for the majority of people it's misleading most people look at the lines and the relative distance between them to make judgment calls. Not literally the entire point of graphs, to visually display information.
This is a well-known effect and is taught in pretty much every major curriculum.
And the above was literally how I was thought to represent data in university. Maximize the areas of interest, make sure to properly label your axes (lest they become misleading), and remember to trim empty space where relevant.
But it appears that proper graphs for science and engineering reports may not be used for representing data to the common man, as it must be assumed that, even for the most simple of graphs, the common man will only look at the funny line, but not the graph itself.