humor, politics

How to Visualize Veracity

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As John Adams noted long ago, facts are stubborn things.  So are misconceptions.  Tossing dull little facts against a seductively simple misconception is like tossing pebbles against a window.  To break the window, U must organize the pebbles into something like a chunk of concrete.

One way to organize facts is to create a clear and colorful visualization that sums up the take-away.  One kind of visualization is a bar chart where all the big bars have the same length but are divided into little bars of various lengths.  Perhaps a green little bar shows the percentage of my daily protein that comes from breakfast, while yellow and red little bars show the percentages that come from lunch and dinner.  Another big bar shows those 3 percentages for somebody else.  This kind of bar chart can be very helpful when there are more kinds of little bar than just breakfast/lunch/dinner, if the chart marker chooses colors well.

An excellent example of this kind of bar chart is in a Daily Kos post by Auriandra dated 2016-10-05.  The whole post is a good read; the chart is shown below, in a cropped screenshot.

politifact_2016-09-29

Contrary to what many cartoonists and progressive purists (not to mention right-wingers) proclaim, Hillary Clinton is relatively truthful, among the pols considered.  (None of them deserve high marks by the standards of scientific research or testimony under oath.)  By far the least truthful is Donald Trump.

If voters eventually notice and heed the veracity difference between Clinton/Kaine and Trump/Pence, the loss will leave Trump angry at the fact checkers.  How can someone with his skillset (blustering; lying; swindling) get back at them?  He could try for yet another Pants-on-Fire rating, with a lie about the fermentation capabilities of his microbiome.

Revenge for Fact Checking
|Donald Trump could say
|his farts and his shit smell like
|warm cinnamon rolls.