How to Lie with Statistics

Description

Over Part a Million Copies Offered–an Fair-to-Goodness Bestseller

Darrell Huff runs the gamut of each popularly used form of statistic, probes things like the pattern examine, the tabulation manner, the interview methodology, or the way in which the consequences are derived from the figures, and issues up the numerous selection of dodges which might be used to complete quite than to tell.
“There’s terror in numbers,” writes Darrell Huff in How to Lie with Statistics. And nowhere does this terror translate to blind recognition of authority greater than within the slippery international of averages, correlations, graphs, and developments. Huff sought to wreck via “the daze that follows the collision of Information with the human thoughts” with this narrow quantity, first revealed in 1954. The e book is still related as a warning call for folks unaccustomed to analyzing the unending go with the flow of numbers pouring from Wall Boulevard, Madison Road, and far and wide else somebody has an awl to grind, some extent to end up, or a product to promote. “The name of the game language of Information, so interesting in a truth-minded tradition, is hired to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify,” warns Huff.

Even supposing most of the examples used within the e book are charmingly dated, the cautions are undying. Information are rife with possibilities for misuse, from “gee-whiz graphs” that upload nonexistent drama to developments, to “effects” indifferent from their manner and that means, to stats’ final bugaboo–inaccurate lead to-and-impact reasoning. Huff’s tone is tolerant and amused, however no-nonsense. Like a lecturing father, he expects you to be told one thing helpful from the e book, and get started making use of it on a daily basis. By no means be a sucker once more, he cries!

Even if you can’t discover a supply of demonstrable bias, permit your self a point of skepticism in regards to the effects so long as there’s a chance of bias someplace. There at all times is.

Learn How to Lie with Statistics. Whether or not you stumble upon Information at paintings, in class, or in promoting, you can remember that its easy courses. Do not be terrorized by means of numbers, Huff implores. “In point of fact that, in spite of its mathematical base, Information is as so much an artwork as this can be a technological know-how.” –Therese Littleton
Statistions, methods to lie
Darrell Huff
Illustrated by means of Irving Genis
New York – London 5 6 7 8 9 zero