A guest post (by William Faulkner, João Martinho, and Heather Muntzer) put up on my friend Stephanie Evergreen’s blog sparked a big discussion in the comment section.
I’ll paraphrase a little…
Stats People – You don’t understand anything. Confidence intervals really stand for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this is the wrong way to visualize. Oh and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Stephanie – Okay, so how would you visualize it?
Stats People – Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, stats police on you, blah, blah, blah.
Stephanie – No really, please share an alternative.
Stats people – …
***
This is a big problem people.
If we don’t learn how to communicate things simply or at least try to figure out how, the US might elect some jerk who has no regard for actual data and might push through budgets and policies in an attempt to kill lots of important federally funded science and evaluation…
Oh wait.
