The lack of confidence created in beautiful data visualization

In this TED Talk, David McCandless discusses the many visualizations he's utilized, developed, and believes can change the way we think. He makes the important point of describing the amount of effort that goes into compressing data in order to clearly articulate the data and its relative importance to other data.



I believe, one of the more unique visualizations he utilizes is the "bubble race". This essentially is a visualization that shows two types of dependent variables for each independent variable. In the below example, the dependent variables are the evidence for and the popularity of a supplement's effects on the benefit to the listed health topics. He explains that they had scraped about 1000 articles from pubmed for this visualization.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/

However, one of the challenges that I know is often a challenge with those who are not used to having their beliefs over turned by strange concepts (namely those who are not used to the strange concepts that emerge from universities) would have little reason to believe some of his visualizations. I imagine that Mr. McCandless might find a larger number of his viewers more greatly engaging with his visualizations and that we as a society might be able to create better arguments through larger transparency in our visualizations. Tying these visualizations to the data in a way that can easily articulate where the data came from and allow us to zoom in as far as we'd like on the data, can help this issue.

David has discussed information design and how to guide high level analysis of data. However, he has done little to help us identify how to design information transfer and engagement between mistrusting individuals.

- Michael