Name: How Charts Lie
ISBN: 9781324001560

How Charts Lie

A leading data visualization expert explores the negative - and positive - influences that charts have on our perception of truth. We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous - and easier to share than ever. While such visualizations can better inform us, they can also deceive by displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns - or simply misinform us by being poorly designed, such as the confusing “eye of the storm” maps shown on TV every hurricane season. Many of us are ill equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate visuals to promote their own agendas. Public conversations are increasingly driven by numbers, and to make sense of them we must be able to decode and use visual information. By examining contemporary examples ranging from election-result infographics to global GDP maps and box-office record charts, How Charts Lie teaches us how to do just that.

What Hacker News says

FarmadupeSep 2026

I'd actually recommend some excellent books on the "philosophy" of data presentation: The first that comes to mind is "the visual display of quantitative information" by Edward Tufte seems to be freely available online, and the other one on my mind is "how charts lie" by Alberto Cairo (which doesn't seem to be freely accessible)

But if it helps, just some "initial gut feel observations" from me:

* It's definitely not possible to find issue with the the _sheer amount_ of results, but there's just far too much for a human to absorb, all presented at once

* Overall text size is quite small, and difficult to read

* The page doesn't make a strong statement of _what_ is under test: the first words are: "modern-fs-benchmark Multi-device CoW filesystems under workloads classic benchmarks skip" -- which defines the webpage in terms of what it is _not_, without stating what benchmarks are actually present.

* The first line of teh page contains run statistics that probably eithre want to b at the bottom, or just don't need to be in the webpage at all: "latest run 2026-09-18 18:50:45 UTC, kernel 7.0.0-1012-azure, 593 runs recorded · 145 trend points shown"

* A significant proportion of the free text is caveats. There's nothing wrong with being transparent about limitations, but they may be a sign that there might be alternative ways to present the data, or that the data may be flawed (depending on the caveat)

* Theres several categories that I think have been invented for the purpose of collation, but I don't think are defined on the page. I think "Overall Core" and "Core I/O" aren't explained, which means by definition it's impossible for a reader to understand the score table.

* And as we're all aware right now, current Claude models are currently struggling to write coherent English. There's several incoherent sentences on the page. It's a Claude issue.

thread

datadrivenangelAug 2025

People interested in misleading data visualization should look into Alberto Cairo's Book: How Charts Lie

thread

neuroclineJun 2020

I went through my recent-books shelves and found a few shorter books that are well worth reading. Short books for developers are rare these days.

Algorithms Unlocked, Thomas Cormen, 212 pages

The Art of Readable Code, Dustin Boswell & Trevor Foucher, 180 pages

How To Take Smart Notes, Sonke Ahrens, 151 pages

How to Write a Thesis, Umberto Eco, 223 pages

How Charts Lie, Alberto Cairo, 193 pages

thread

malsheNov 2019

Alberto Cairo recently released his "How Charts Lie". It's a delightful read.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Charts-Lie-Getting-Information/dp...

thread

nevesOct 2019

Alberto Cairo, who produced the charts in the paper is about to publish the book "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information". His other books are excellent, I bet this one will also be.

thread