tufte-graphical-competencelisted

# Graphical Competence: Why Organizations Produce Bad Graphics ## Overview Every other skill in this pack fixes a display; this one fixes the shop that made it. Tufte's diagnosis in VDQI Chapter 3 ("Sources of Graphical Integrity and Sophistication," pp. 79–87) is that lying and inept graphics are not primarily technical accidents — bias and stereotyping account for some distortions, but the primary causes are the prevailing skills, attitudes, and organizational structure of the people who design and edit statistical graphics (p. 79). Two working doctrines — *statistics are boring* and *graphics are for the unsophisticated* — hand control of data displays to a single expertise (the artistic), and the predictable products are graphics that lie, that use only the simplest designs, and that miss the real news in the data (p. 87). The remedy is structural: graphical competence demands three different skills at once, and the substantive and statistical two must actually participate. Boundaries with siblings: the *mechanics* of graphical lies (Lie Factor, design variation, the six integrity principles of p. 77) live in **`tufte-graphical-integrity`**; single-artifact corruption detection lives in **`tufte-evidence-corruption`** (whose cross-book note defers to this chapter for the causal account); the institutional critique of slideware is **`tufte-cognitive-style`**. This skill carries the organizational diagnosis, the sophistication metric, and the staffing remedy. ## §1. The