Too often, I find myself looking at this or that new map on the happiest places to live in the United States, the states with the most craft beer, or, more importantly, the least social mobility. I glance at where I live and think, well, it could be worse. At least I don’t live in Alabama. And then I move on.

Maps like these have become ubiquitous—indeed, some media outlets have entire sections devoted to them. But the 50-state map infographic is becoming the new pie chart—overused, often abused, and not always best suited for the task at hand.

Clearly, not all of these maps are bad—sometimes they really are the most effective way to communicate the information at hand. But as Ben Blatt has pointed out in Slate, the underlying data are often much “noisier” and often the methodology doesn’t translate (methodology isn’t exactly good for generating clickbait).

Taking a simple example of popular girls names over the last couple decades, he walks through some of the false trends that appear in the maps based on how the data are aggregated and presented—maybe not that big of a deal for baby names, but might be for looking at unemployment rates.

Even more problematic, our infatuation with maps as infographics often masks the real analytical power of new mapping tools. Used properly, they can help us understand real issues—especially complex, as well as fundamentally local, issues like social mobility and educational access.