Claude
458ccaeb17
Titles are scanned in the gallery and recognized in a link, so they should say what the sin is rather than pun about it. Retitles the three published sins and the backlog's working titles, and records the rule in CLAUDE.md: the title names the problem, the poke carries the voice. Filenames are untouched, so existing URLs still resolve. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
1.7 KiB
title, summary, poke, category, severity, tags, badChart, fixedChart, date, citations
| title | summary | poke | category | severity | tags | badChart | fixedChart | date | citations | |||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two Y-Axes Scaled to Look Correlated | Two unrelated series on two independent axes, engineered to look correlated. | Two y-axes, scaled until the lines overlap — and suddenly anything 'causes' anything. | False Relationships | 5 |
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dual-axis-bad | dual-axis-fixed | 2026-08-05 |
|
The sin
Put two series on the same plot with two independent y-axes and you can make anything look correlated. Slide the scales until the lines overlap and the reader's brain does the rest: "these move together, so one must cause the other."
Why it deceives
With independent axes, the vertical position of each line is arbitrary — you chose it. Overlapping lines imply a relationship that exists only because you tuned two scales to coincide. Ice cream sales and shark attacks both rise in summer; neither causes the other. The shared season is the hidden variable.
The repentance
Don't force two series into one coordinate space just to imply a link. Show them in separate, stacked panels with honest zero-based scales. If you truly want to argue they move together, plot one against the other (a scatter plot) and let the reader judge the relationship — don't manufacture it with axis scaling.