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As much as I like lovely exercises like this, we need to stop saying that the choropleth map is "misleading". It can be misleading *if you don't know how to read it for the purpose it was created for*—to show who won were, nothing else. The problem isn't the map, but its improper interpretation.

I think this depends on dialect and audience To me there's a definition of misleadingness (or maybe correctness) where if there are perceptual operations on a chart your audience will tend to perform and those operations do not correspond to valid data operations, arguably the chart is incorrect

This relates to some topics in my next book. When we design a (communicative) chart, we imbue it with intentionality—fancy word for "aboutness",—we stipulate what it means, so to speak. But on the other side of the cycle there's interpretation. A mismatch between the two is what causes confusion 1/2

A separate discussion is whether certain representational structures persistently lead people to certain (mis)interpretations. Scatter plots are a good case: even if you keep reminding yourself "don't infer causation"... 2/3

...there's something in the chart itself, in the way that it's constructed, that prompts you to do *exactly that* There are some fascinating pages about this in Clayton's "Bernoulli's Fallacy". Would we then say that scatter plots are systematically misleading? Open question! 3/3

This is a great point --- incorrect interpretation can happen even if the "surface" interpretation like the presence/strength of a correlation is correct, so how do we draw the line at attributing misleadingness to the chart versus something else (like proficiency at statistical or causal reasoning)

This is really good! I like this a lot: "what he means is that the condition for a representation to be an epistemic representation of a target, you have to be able to make inferences about this target based on inferences you first make about the vehicle."

There's a lot to unpack in that sentence. For example "being able to make inferences" doesn't mean "being able to make CORRECT inferences". Long story. We should chat one day but, if interested, Contessa's only book is freely available: philarchive.org/archive/CONM...

I also agree you can't just attribute misleadingness to an object. Lately I've been thinking a lot about visualization in terms of "dialects". Misleadingness probably only exists for a visualization for a person embedded in their context and whatever dialect they "speak".

Yes. That's why I wrote, as I do in the book, that the "representation" isn't the visualization itself —that's just the "vehicle" of the representation. I conceptualize representation as a process, consisting of the entire cycle of embedding-derivation-inference-interpretation... 1/2