‘The Cartography of Bullshit’

At ‘Africa Is A Country’, Siddhartha Mitter discusses Max Fisher‘s article ‘A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries’, derived from World Values Survey data:

We are left with a shiny color-coded “fascinating map” on the Washington Post site that sends a strong message of Western, Anglo-Saxon moral superiority, assorted with a mystifying portrayal of the rest of the world, and accompanied by near-gibberish interpretations – all based on a methodological process that fails pretty much every standard of social-science design and data hygiene. In other words, pseudo-analysis that ends up, whether by design or by accident, playing into an ideological agenda.

More here.