Visual Displays of Uncertainty

A recent post on Gelman's Stats blog (by Jessica Hullman) nicely merges a few critical threads. One involves Tufte's classic push to display data in creative and informative ways (see, e.g., Tufte's classic). Another relates to a detectable nudge towards emphasizing results' "uncertainty" rather than a "false" sense of "precision" through, say, point estimates. While Jessica's discussion dwells on election forecast uncertainty--and interesting ways to visually convey it--the basic point includes obvious spill-over implications. As well, even if one is persuaded that visually conveying uncertainty is a worthwhile objective, the question about whether withholding point estimates a good idea is not easily answered.