Who should I talk to in a group? I have a bunch of existing "social senses" for navigating this, but they're not very reliable. If a clear You-Should-Talk-To-This-Person sense went off whenever I encountered someone appropriate, that would be nice.

You are definitely right in that we need to think about how it will look to another human being.

If you are interested in pursuing this idea further, Don Norman has written a number of books about design in general. These are not about graphic design but just design thinking. The Psychology of Everyday Things is a classic and Emotional Design builds on the work of people like Antonio Damasio with regard to the role of emotion in cognition. Norman has another book called The Design of Everyday Things which I have not read but I imagine is a great read as well.

All of these works emphasize the role of design in helping humans accomplish their goals. Some practitioners of data analytics view the output of prose, charts, tables and graphs as the final product. In most cases however the final product of a data analytics effort is a decision. That decision might be to do more research, to buy one company versus another or propose a new policy to Congress. Regardless of the nature of the decision, how well you design the output will have an impact on the quality of the decision made.

I don't know, esr seems to be stretching the point here. His two "good" types of anti-intellectualism, Hayek and Sowell, I would probably call internecine warfare. Both his examples were intellectuals and I doubt they would object to more intellectuals like themselves.

If using multiple screens at work made you more productive, care to give an example or two what do you put on one and the other and how they interact? Perhaps also negatives, in what situations that doesn't help?

Hypothesis: they only work with transformation type work e.g. translation where you read a document in one and translate in another, or read a spec in one and write code to implement it in another or at any rate the output you generate is strongly dependent on an input that you need to keep referring to.

I actually borrowed a TV as a second screen because I need to re-create the layouts of document reports from an old accounting software in a new. So it is handy to have the example on the TV while I work on the new one. Of course a printout on a music-stand would work just as well...

With your background in web development have you read things like Krug's Don't Make Me Think and William's The Non-Designer's Design Book? These are focused more on the design aspect of web however they contain some good underlying principles for data visualization as well.

Tufte's book are all great for underlying principles even though, as you noted, they aren't focused on modern technologies. Beautiful Evidence from 2006 has some updated thoughts but he still borrows heavily from his earlier books.

For general multimedia concepts, Mayer's Multimedia Learning is good from a human learning perspective (my background).

I found Data Points: Visualization That Means Something to be a good modern guide.

From my perspective, I am glad you are looking down the road and recognizing that after the data are analyzed the analysis must be communicated.

How are we operationalising "best" here? The purpose of textbooks is to efficiently impart material. Popular books have a wide variety of purposes (to inform, inspire, entertain, polemicise, etc.), so by what standard are we holding one popular book to be superior to another?

I feel like you two are talking about a different type of variance. It may be that Titanic is well-loved in every culture all over the world, ever. But there are still individuals who didn't enjoy it. I think sixes means that LW is unusually good at alieving that not everybody enjoyed Titanic.

My job (not at the WSJ!) gave me The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics: The Dos and Don'ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures in my new hire bundle, and I love it!

Learn the library ggplot2. It is worth learning the language R just to use this library (though there is a port in progress for python/pandas). Even if you cannot incorporate the library into your workflow, its very good defaults show you what you should be doing with more work in other libraries.

It is named after a book, the Grammar of Graphics, that I have not read.

A lot of online communities pay lip service to the idea that their experiences aren't universal, but Less Wrong seems to be one of the few places that takes that idea seriously.