They link to an infographic on fuel sources and energy use from loveinfographics.com. Then they ask you to look at it for 10 seconds and ask they ask what you have learned.
I might as well ask people (who don't speak Chinese) to run the author's article through Bablefish English > Chinese, remove all images, then read "Why We Hate Infographics" article carefully and tell what they learned. It would, of course, be a useless article, but that does not reflect badly on the article: it was never intended to be consumed that way!
The infographic they link to is the kind of infographic that I find extremely valuable (and also quite difficult to create). A diagram which conveys a VERY significant amount of information in a very concise format. Looking at that graphic I can glean the following facts:
* Gas and oil make up a little more than half of US fuel supplies. * Electricity is used roughly equally by residential, commercial, and industrial clients (well, slightly less for industrial). * I heat my home with fuel oil. Apparently I'm a minority in that, but not by an extreme amount: we fuel oil users make up maybe 5% of the usage (not the population).
None of that information was a specific detail that the chart authors wanted to convey, so using less detailed methods would never have conveyed the information. A series of charts with numbers could have conveyed the information, but not in a form I could have processed with my brain (unless maybe I used it to build a chart like this).
I want to defend complex data visualizations that convey large amounts of information in easily perceived ways. I still think the "infographics" that just just illustrate things with pretty pictures are stupid.