"Accumulation through waste"
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2026
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I very much disagree. There are extremely few cases where a y-axis shouldn't start at zero. Anything that reasonably can be shown that way, should be, because the alternative just fucks with the monkey brain too much.
starting from zero is also fucking with your monkey brain, in this context downplaying the severity of the drop people actually experienced. all data representation is subjective. scale and origin point of charts are constantly manipulated in different scientific and statistical contexts to convey different information. obviously you have to be careful in order not to misrepresent your data, but always choosing zero can also lead to misrepresentation.
Well.. no, it isn't downplaying it. It's representing it perfectly. That's quite literally the point.
When graphs aren't zero-based, you immediately make a bad intellectual assumption as well as an 'emotional' reaction to the size of the graph. That immediate bad assumption poisons the way you think.
The only time you shouldn't zero-base a graph is when the change is too small to reasonably decipher without enlarging the scale. I'll die on that hill.