[quenix]

Driving isn't a medium of communication, so this is an apples to oranges comparison.

If a medium of communication is misunderstood and found to be misleading to your audience, it doesn't really matter whether it's an education problem or not. It ceases to be a good communication medium.

The entire purpose of data viz as the author discussed is to convey ideas to other people. The author argues that people tend to misunderstand this specific chart type. It is valid, then, to dismiss the visualisation as bad for public communication.

Unfortunately, the technical merits of these things don't matter if most people don't understand them.

[SillyUsername]

As I've mentioned in other comments less succinctly, data hiding is sometimes useful of for drawing attention to other areas.

There are the better graphs the author mentioned for general purpose use, but the graph itself isn't at fault any more than using a bar chart with a poor scale (e.g omit 0-20) to do the same hiding.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

What specific issue do you have with this article? “The graph itself isn’t at fault” is very “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. Who cares? This distinction is utterly meaningless semantics. Why do you feel a need to ‘stand up’ for box plots? Why is this a tribalistic religious war?

[JumpCrisscross]

> Driving isn't a medium of communication

There is a lot of implicit (e.g. traffic signals) and explicit (e.g. indicators and horns) inter-driver communication that is at the heart of most crashes.