Jim Stein
speaker
85 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2019
last heard Dec 2019
Jim Stein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hello, this is Jim Stein, your host for New Books and Mathematics.
Our guest today is Alberto Cairo, author of How Charts Lie.
If Benjamin Disraeli had had the opportunity to read this book, he might have revised his well-known quote to say that there are four kinds of lies.
Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Misleading Charts.
This book does a masterful job of explaining the lies that charts are capable of making believable and exactly why they are so pernicious.
Alberto, welcome to the show.
Alberto, what motivated you to write this book?
You know, before going into the specifics of your book, one of the things I think readers will appreciate about your book is that you use topical and controversial issues to illustrate many of your major points.
And that brings us to the importance of being able to read charts, because we see so many.
Why is it so important to be able to read charts?
Yeah, I think it's extremely important, and I also think that the ability to read practically anything is declining in our society, and I think that's regrettable.
Alberto, that's an extremely valuable and important point.
And I'm a teacher and I've noticed that my present day students seem to have the attention span of fruit flies.
Great advice for everyone and everything.
Anyway, the book opens with several maps depicting the election of 2016, and you point out that they are often misinterpreted by people from all over the political spectrum.
It certainly shows how either side of an issue can create a deceptive chart.
Alberto, I think you did a very good job in the last few minutes of describing a chart.
And it's very helpful to the listeners that you're able to describe it so well.
But your book is highly visual.
And one of the things that, obviously, because it's charts, and one of the things that I appreciated about reading your book is,
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