The Best Visualizations on Every Subject

You should create a github.com repo ala the Awesome lists (e.g., https://github.com/hellerve/programming-talks). Lesswrong does not lend itself well to these collaborative community resources, as evidenced by the death of The Best Textbooks on Every Subject [LW · GW].

Standford's collection of ancient data visualizations

https://exhibits.stanford.edu/dataviz

Complexity Explorables: interactive toys to learn about complex dynamical systems.

http://complexity-explorables.org/

The current state of AIDS in the European Union

https://www.politico.eu/article/aids-european-state-of-play/

Evolution of word usage in Scientific American over the last 150 years

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/explore-175-years-of-words-in-scientific-american/

Which and how body parts are described in literature, according to gender

https://pudding.cool/2020/07/gendered-descriptions/

Heatmap of mortality rates over the last centuries, by age, country and gender
https://jschoeley.shinyapps.io/hmdexp/

Historic usage of the word "ass"

https://pudding.cool/2019/10/slang/ (and anything by The Pudding really)

Simulated dendrochronology of USA immigration

https://web.northeastern.edu/naturalizing-immigration-dataviz/

Some meta thoughts, since I've thought a lot about what made the best-textbooks thread work: 

• I think the inclusion criteria for the best textbook thread were really important. Having a relatively objective inclusion criteria made people more comfortable posting, and made using it as a trusted source a good bit better. 
• I think having the top-level post update with new additions was really valuable, and caused the post to be a good long-term reference. A github repo might work, but I expect the trivial inconvenience of clicking through the link to make it a lot less useful (you want people to come back to the place where they can submit new visualizations if you want the thing to keep getting new submissions).
• Limiting it to one submission per comment was really useful because it allowed for fine-grained upvoting and downvoting of various suggestions, and made navigating the thread a lot easier. I would also recommend doing that.

I use beauty as one of my top criteria for deciding whether to read a textbook. Textbooks I haven't had time to review:

I'd like to recommend Molecular Biology of the Cell as having made my heart sing, but I haven't completed it, and I'm a biology noob, so what do I know?

For biochemistry, I think the Roche Biochemical Pathways chart is awesome, if a little overwhelming:

http://biochemical-pathways.com/#/map/1

I don't recommend using it to learn biochemistry but it's pretty great to see it all laid out in one place like that.

Here's a visualisation that goes along with Euclid's elements

This was one of many from an article on "The Empirical MetaMathematics of Euclid and Beyond". It is a long essay on the overarching structure of Euclid's elements and verifies some claims made about Euclid's Elements e.g. the proofs were ordered in nearly the most parsimonious way possible. It also finds the most difficult theorems in each book, the greatest possible reductions in proof length, and hints that the network of theorem dependancy has a local 2-d structure. Highly recommend the article. 

Domain of Science is a YouTube channel that among other things makes maps of different fields of study, which can be a very nice way to get an overview of the different subjects in a given field.

Some good math visualization on YouTube include: 3Blue1Brown, Think Twice, Reducible, Welch Labs, Primer

Our World in Data for data visualization.

Explorable Explanations - A bunch of things explained visually and interactively.

tree of life explorers (TOLE) - OneZoom, MinuteLabs TLOE, and more (just search the term online)

For the field of chemistry, I nominate The Periodic Table of the Elements.  I know it's old but it really does capture a surprising amount of information in a visually pleasing format.

This isn’t a textbook, but Dataclysm by Christian Rudder was a major inspiration to me when I was new to data analysis. The book is like a long data analysis project around dating on OKCupid (Rudder founded the site), and has a lot of good graphs made just for the book. Unlike some of the popular examples made famous by e.g. Tufte, the graphs in Dataclysm are of the type an analyst in 2020 might typically make in their day-to-day work. Lots of scatter plots and bar plots, but created thoughtfully enough to really be something. Rarely in this book did I think “ah, beautiful” - much more often, I thought “ah, yup, I see the relationship he’s saying exists.”

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I made a bunch of math and physics diagrams and animations back in my wikipedia days: :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sbyrnes321

Definetely not a subject, but I'd say that the visualisation of Wolfram's theory of everything is excellent. Of course there are problems with his theory of everything, like the fact that he hasn't actually proved his claims that it generates GR field equations or replicates QM. Or shown that his theory evades the critical objection Scott Aaronson raised. but as a visualisation:

1. It is aesthetically pleasing
2. Compactly contains the basic ideas of his T.o.E. 
3. Ties the basic concepts together to see how they could generate a theory of physics

So I'd still recommend it. 

Question: should we include here, or make a separate location for, data visualization tools? By tools I mean the methods by which to make visualizations and/or maybe guidance for how.

This is clearly related, but it seems like a separate problem. It might be much more useful to the people in the community who maintain their own blog or have related professional obligations, which is a more distinct subset.