How to Lie with Statistics
- How to Lie with Statistics
"How to Lie with Statistics" is Darrell Huff's perennially popular[ "Over the last fifty years, How to Lie with Statistics has sold more copies than any other statistical text." J.M. Steele. " [http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Publications/PDF/TN148.pdf Darrell Huff and Fifty Years of "How to Lie with Statistics"] . "Statistical Science", 20 (3), 2005, 205–209.] introduction to statistics for the general reader. Written in 1954, it is a brief, breezy, illustrated volume outlining common errors, both intentional and unintentional, associated with the interpretation of statistics, and how these errors can lead to inaccurate conclusions. ]The original edition contained humorous illustrations by Irving Geis. [In 1961, Geis would go on to illustrate the first protein crystal structure ever discovered, that of a sperm whale myoglobin]
Over time it has become one of the most widely read statistics books in history, with over one and a half million copies sold in the English-language edition.
Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using Random Sampling". It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality:
# By truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, one makes differences seem larger than they are
# By representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, one makes the reader forget that the images don't scale the same way the quantities do. Two rows of small images would give a better idea than one small and one big one.
ee also
*Exaggeration
*Misuse of statistics
*Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Notes and references
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