More Tufte Quoting

From "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information":

Much of twentieth-century thinking about statistical graphics has been preoccupied with the question of how some amateurish chart might fool a naive viewer. Other important issues, such as the use of graphics for serious data analysis, were largely ignored. At the core of the preoccupation with deceptive graphics was the assumption that data graphics were mainly devices for showing the obvious to the ignorant. It is hard to imagine any doctrine more likely to stifle intellectual progress in a field. The assumption led down two fruitless paths in the graphically barren years from 1930 to 1970: First, that graphics had to be "alive", "communicatively dynamic", overdecorated and exaggerated (otherwise all the dullards in the audience would fall asleep in the face of those boring statistics). Second, that the main task of graphical analysis was to detect and denounce deception (the dullards could not protect themselves).

With a generic but powerful analysis tool, it's easy to focus on how unskilled users can screw up. It's a lot more obvious when something goes wrong than when something great just doesn't happen. But the most important, most permanent, most exciting effect is to make a skilled user even more powerful.

Same goes for statistical charts as search engines.