Via Turley.
The question is not how many Fox viewers will figure out that the pie chart comes out to 193%, but how many will argue that this somehow makes perfect sense. Thus far, the best explanation is that math is another Obama socialist conspiracy. This explanation, of course, is obviously false given the Obama administration’s explanation that Health Care Reform is cost neutral. Politics defies the constraints of arithmatic.
And if you believe in inertia, consider Lou Dobbs.
Next week: Can politics defy the rules of gravity?
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Can you say “not mutually exclusive?”
I could, but then I would be forced to also add “utterly meaningless.”
“Meaningless” should suffice.
Or, you could read the actual poll and try telling that to Opinion Dynamics directly. I think they might disagree about the notion of “not mutually exclusive”:
Here’s the relevant data from the source:
6 Responses to “Poll Watch: Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Political Survey”
1. Tommy Boy Says:
November 19th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
Also in the poll:
Favorable/unfavorable
Among Republicans [net]
Sarah Palin 70/21 [+49]
Mike Huckabee 63/15 [+48]
Mitt Romney 60/16 [+44]
Fox News may be (is) guilty of bad spelling; and you may feel that “backs” is not synonymous with “favorable.”
And, Fox may indeed be stupid.
But I don’t think you can draw that conclusion from the screenshot you chose to highlight.
I think you’ve missed the point (twice) on this one. The poll is irrelevant; How Fox chose to present it to the public is the point. Good try, though.
No, the graphic is still wrong. Thanks to you, we see that the numbers are correct, but a pie chart is the wrong tool for presenting this data. Pie charts are for showing how something is divided up, but the numbers aren’t reporting mutually exclusive values. The data is comparative, so some sort of bar chart would be the right approach. With the graphic Fox chose, we can’t tell what they really mean without looking at the data.
Whatever good can be said about pie charts, they’re manifestly not the right way to show stuff that adds up to more than 100%.
Even if the subject is “What kind of pie do you like?”
Good point, Windy; well seen and well said.
I think you’re quite right about pie charts; in fact pie chart software usually automatically calculates to 100%, which means the Fox editors had to manually override the graphic; which certainly suggests they are graphically challenged. Further, the cognitive disconnect that we all felt on seeing it is proof of our your point that pie-charts are intuitively read as being for exclusive data.
It’s still true, however, that “graphically challenged” is manifestly different than “can’t add,” which is what the original post, and title, specifically stated.
Scott is not the only one to read it this way; google it and you’ll find dozens of others willing to impute computational ineptitude. Or just plain stupidity.
But you’ll also find others, not just me, who when they see such a glaring disconnect (yes I felt it too) do NOT automatically assume the writer is an idiot, but look for another explanation.
It very quickly occurred to me this is one of those cases where people confuse mutually exclusive data with mutually non-exclusive data. And, not to put too fine a point on it–that’s exactly what was happening here. The data was non-exclusive. The presentation led (some) people to believe the data was exclusive, and therefore to impute ignorance to the editors.
In Scott’s case, he suggested that an attempt to make sense of the data was absurd, and rejected my suggestion of non-exclusive data as “utterly meaningless.”
Again, Scott is hardly alone. The tendency to impute idiocy to others at the drop of a hat is natural, even human; but it’s also something to guard against. It’s often fun when phrased as sarcasm, but sarcasm also gives the writer plausible deniability–you can never prove when they were just being rhetorically over-the-top and when they were being just flat wrong.
It’s damning enough that a major “news” network would get the graphic display wrong in the way Windy suggests; but I still think it’s over the top to conclude from that faux pas that Fox editors can’t add.
The numbers look about right for Florida.
Why are you writing about what I “suggest”? What I suggest is what everyone else here can read themselves, and hence they wouldn’t possibly need you to explain what I “suggest”. That it, unless you’re trying desperately to recharacterize what I’ve written so that you won’t look foolish for your original insipid comment.
I wasn’t making fun of the data, but of the chart used by Fox News. You were the one to raise the data, which had nothing to do with my post. It’s fine that you don’t grasp the obvious, but please don’t try to attribute your comprehension issues to me so that you don’t look ignorant. That’s dishonest, Charles. Certainly not what one would expect of a trusted advisor.
An awful lot of dancing. Wouldn’t it be easier to just admit you screwed up rather than trying to spin your way out of it?