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Or any topic that involves more than one interacting decision, a graph, or any numbers at all.

COVID made it pretty clear that neither the general population nor most politicians are remotely qualified to make decisions. Not just medical decisions, just… decisions.



I have a lot of very smart friends, like significantly higher than average in terms of degrees and technical jobs and standardized testing scores at least.

One of them purchased a game that is like Apples to Apples but the point is to provide labels or name the axis of a graph.

It was enlightening just how many of my friends that had a passing notion of calculus could not intuitively interpret what a graph actually means. For example, they would often misunderstand the relation between the dependent and independent variable, or not even understand what it meant for a variable to depend on another variable. Too bad too, because it was a really fun game for me.


Something I saw a smart IT manager do is produce graphs for the monthly board report without a legend, labels, or any numbers at all. Just lines, but not even grid lines.

His explanation was that nobody understood the numbers anyway, the graph is just there to be a pretty colourful picture while he talks.




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