I didn't see that article the first time around, but I have to agree with the parent post; when I read today's post, I saw the graphs and didn't understand what they were trying to say (with or without xkcd-ification). So I quickly skimmed the December article for context on those graphs, and I still didn't understand what they were actually representing.
Rereading that section, and the code, I slowly decipher it... they are presenting histograms... I see labels "cost_benefit", so presumably that's a ratio... oh wait in the next paragraph he writes "cost - benefits" so I guess it's a scalar... but I still don't see why the side-by-side histograms are presented with varying-width buckets... oh, because he fixed the Y-axis, which constrains the bucket widths....
The problem, as lotyrin implies, isn't that the "lines weren't squiggly enough". It's that it's a graph that's hard to read and understand what it's trying to say, due to a total lack of labels or context.
(I also take issue with a lot of his assumptions and even his definition of Basic Income, but if we take in good faith his claim that his Monte Carlo article wasn't about economics and public policy but about python and using the scipy library, those are not necessarily complaints about the article.)
This. This might seem like a minor nitpick, but plots without axis labels are a big no-no and far from 'publication quality'. In academic publishing the general editorial goal is to aim to make your graphs as readable as possible on their own, without forcing the reader to refer to the article to try make sense of them. Just my two cents.
Rereading that section, and the code, I slowly decipher it... they are presenting histograms... I see labels "cost_benefit", so presumably that's a ratio... oh wait in the next paragraph he writes "cost - benefits" so I guess it's a scalar... but I still don't see why the side-by-side histograms are presented with varying-width buckets... oh, because he fixed the Y-axis, which constrains the bucket widths....
The problem, as lotyrin implies, isn't that the "lines weren't squiggly enough". It's that it's a graph that's hard to read and understand what it's trying to say, due to a total lack of labels or context.
(I also take issue with a lot of his assumptions and even his definition of Basic Income, but if we take in good faith his claim that his Monte Carlo article wasn't about economics and public policy but about python and using the scipy library, those are not necessarily complaints about the article.)