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How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

judg.me

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Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#21

Post by leoedin »

Last time something from judg.me was posted, there was a lot of criticism about your statistical methods of analysis. You've clearly put a lot of effort into attempting to do a better analysis of the data, and this time there's certainly an improvement in terms of actual analytical methods used.

However, the graphs (as others have said) are terrible. Simply having a graph type available to you doesn't mean you have to use it! For the sake of your readers, please, please, only use one type of graph. Stick with a plain bar chart. Nobody minds that it's not as fancy looking as a pseudo-3D bar chart or one with pointed cones. People want to see the data, not the fancy chart.

An additional point to this is labelling your axes. Please do it! If I can't see clearly what an axis represents, I'm inclined to ignore your data. Regardless of how interesting your data is, I'm going to stop reading if it's presented terribly.

These are the sorts of things that get hammered into you in scientific subjects at school/college. You don't need to do that type of class to know them though. There's plenty of information online about this stuff.[1] Worth noting is section 2.6, "Do not misuse the tools". Bad graphs are to statistics what the tag is to HTML.

[1, The UNs guide to presenting statistics]: http://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/stats/documents/writing/M...

Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#22

Post by msellout »

drostie wrote: post #4

Please consider showing more of the variation and including more information about it in your results. You conclude, for example, that "In general, it can be concluded that people can and do make snap judgments about personality and abilities based on superficial physical characteristics." However, a cursory stroll through ranking people on your site reveals that actually, peoples' "snap judgments" show very high sub…

Agreed. All plots should be scatter plots with line-of-best-fit drawn over it.

Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#23

Post by jisaacstone »

wr1472 wrote: post #12
metabrew wrote: post #8

Those graphs are absolutely vile. I kept wondering how anyone who chooses hard-to-read shonky 3d bar charts like that could possibly perform a decent statistical analysis.

Agreed, not the prettiest graphics, but you shouldn't dismiss the data & findings because of it. Unless of course you judge the validity of a study based on the appearance of its graphs?

Annoyed me so much I quit reading half way through.

Not just that it is ugly, but also hard to read. ugh.

Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#24

Post by bvi »

leoedin wrote: post #21

Last time something from judg.me was posted, there was a lot of criticism about your statistical methods of analysis. You've clearly put a lot of effort into attempting to do a better analysis of the data, and this time there's certainly an improvement in terms of actual analytical methods used. However, the graphs (as others have said) are terrible. Simply having a graph type available to you doesn't mean you have t…

Agreed - and I've updated the graphs. Thanks for the comments!

Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#27

Post by john_horton »

aaronjg wrote: post #17
john_horton wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that 3D graphs are terrible, but it's a canard that y-axes always need to start at 0 and that doing anything else is somehow misleading. On this point, see http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/axes-of-evil/

Y-axis need to start at zero when the data being presented is a bar graph and the bar is filled in. If it is a scatter plot with points being plotted, then it's generally not misleading to shift the axis.

I don't disagree with that - a bar chart that doesn't start at zero can be misleading. But for what he was trying to do---compare means---it would have been a perfectly fine choice to do a lineplot/very thin bar plot and start the y-axes somewhere other than zero if he included error bars and clearly labeled things.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#28

Post by doubleconfess »

bvi wrote: post #25
frankiewarren wrote: post #20

How people judge your intelligence based on the looks of your graphs: Take 1.

Haha, fair point. I've updated the graphs!

Wow, this made an even bigger difference than I would have expected. Nicely done!
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