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A comment on Bank Failures Visualized. Parent comment

Re:Bank Failures Visualized by p-e-w on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @01:57AM (#35798533)
> we judge 2D shapes by their area

I've seen this claim a few times in discussions about such charts, but it's far from obvious to me that this is really true. My best guess based on my own perception is that we estimate quantities represented by circles as proportional to something between the diameter and the area.

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Re:Bank Failures Visualized by alanbernstein on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:07AM (#35798608)
Wouldn't that be even worse for interpretability?
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Re:Bank Failures Visualized by RC_ITR on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:17AM (#35798669)
Well is the unit is the diameter, then why add extra dimensionality at all then?

That’s literally what bar charts are for.

I can feel a Tufte monologue coming on, even.

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Re:Bank Failures Visualized by marginalia_nu on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @04:16AM (#35799504)
Human beings are spectacularly shit at comparing areas. If you put two circles next to each other, one with double radius of the other, most humans will say their relation is 3:2.
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