Loading...Charts, by nature, are meant to be a way to visualize numbers to make them more helpful and easier to understand. And most of the time, this is the case. But in recent years some people have been becoming more and more suspicious of charts (at least people who care about this kind of thing) because they can also be used to lie and bend the truth.
In a famous book called How To Lie With Statistics, the author Darrel Huff talks about how, by fiddling with the Y axis of a chart, you can change how the reader perceives the information being displayed if they don’t look close enough. Specifically, making the bottom of the Y axis something other than 0, the usual starting point, can accentuate differences in data points that otherwise wouldn’t be relevant. This is a good thing to know, but as the people at Vox learned, that knowledge has gotten a little out of hand. In this video, you’ll learn that just because the Y axis isn’t zero on a graph, it doesn’t mean they’re lying to you.
And by the way, the title wasn’t directed at you, but at angry commenters sending Vox emails about their charts not starting at 0 on the Y axis. Unless you are one of those commenters…