alt Hacker NewsWhy visualize data? Graphs and charts always felt like the "show your work" in math class. It is forced synesthesia.
The rocket either lands or doesn't, safely, as expected. Green and Red lights are abstracted data plots.
The context should be the focus.
"Rocket must land at less than 0.2/mps" and pump the data into that context filter, more - reduce velocity, less - green light.
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Not every visualized data point is tied to a binary decision.
e.g. when highlighting a quarterly revenue result, there is a big difference between missing the target by 1% or 50% (and of course the absolute number behind it is also important).
And on a larger scale, trajectory is also something that is easily visualized in graphs, and hard to boil down to a binary marker.
There certainly is a lot of "forced synesthesia", and more looking at charts than necessary out there, especially when decisions are then made more from the gut than based on the data one is claiming to base the decisions off, but a culture of binary-based decision making is just as bad of an idea.
I've worked in data for 15 years and I've never heard this argument. I love it :)!
Who knows, with AI this may be the future. Visualizations were created to help us understand data. Florence Nightingale published them "to affect thro' the Eyes what we fail to convey to the public through their word-proof ears."
Often a formula better represents a situation. But I'm not sure how much impact they'd have in spreading that understanding outside of a formula-minded audience.
Sure, machines don't need visualization (although it seems that images are a surprisingly good medium to get context into agents), but humans still do. Mathematicians have plotted functions for a long time now. While the pure truth lies in the definition of f(x), the visualization helps the mind to grasp what it actually is. Humans will run companies for the foreseeable future, and so we will need visualization for the foreseeable future
Without guidance my agents tend to make me read CSVs.
Sure the data is correct, but it's obviously way easier for me to read it as a properly rendered table. Then you want to sort, group, aggregate the data. Visualize it many different ways if you will :)
> Why visualize data?
Because your eyes are enormous bandwidth channels hooked right up to your brain. So high that we can take things like writing which is just a small part of your fov and a set of squiggles that roughly corresponds to sounds you’ve heard and effortlessly comprehend it.
> The rocket either lands or doesn't, safely, as expected.
Crash vs land is a terrible amount of data to have if you want to fix it for next time. Did it accelerate suddenly? Is there a lurch? Did all the accelerometers have a small jump at the same time? Visualising data in different ways can really help show patterns.