Quartz – “The point of charts is to communicate data effectively. Or, at least, that is the point according to data-visualization experts. The truth about why people like and use charts is more complicated than that. For the regular person, it’s more about art than science. There is no better demonstration of this than the popularity of the pie chart. The pie chart has long been reviled by data-visualization experts. “The circle with sectors is not a desirable form of presentation,” wrote the engineer and visualization researcher William Brinton in his 1914 book Graphical Methods. Brinton believed pie charts were difficult to decipher and that it was nearly always better to use a bar chart to convey information. Over the following century, nearly every other serious chart maker came to the same conclusion. Experimental evidence also backed them up. In a paper published in 1984 (paywall), statisticians William Cleveland and Robert McGill showed that people are much more likely to accurately assess information when it’s put in a bar chart than in a pie chart. This is because people tend to underestimate the size of acute angles (<90°), and overestimate the size of obtuse ones (>90°)…”