Mention Books Toward How to Lie with Statistics
| Original Title: | How to Lie With Statistics |
| ISBN: | 0393310728 (ISBN13: 9780393310726) |
| Edition Language: | English |
Darrell Huff
Paperback | Pages: 142 pages Rating: 3.87 | 9863 Users | 1035 Reviews
Point Of Books How to Lie with Statistics
| Title | : | How to Lie with Statistics |
| Author | : | Darrell Huff |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 142 pages |
| Published | : | September 1st 1982 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published 1954) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Science. Business. Mathematics. Economics |
Commentary To Books How to Lie with Statistics
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: The Pirates of the Powerpoint
Darrell Huff uses a simple, but effective literary device to impress his readers about how much statistics affect their daily lives and their understanding of the world.
He does this by pretending that the book is a sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive, like a manual for swindlers, or better, for pirates. He then pretends to justify the crookedness of the book in the manner of the retired burglar whose published reminiscences amounted to a graduate course in how to pick a lock and muffle a footfall: The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense.
This keeps the book interesting and entertaining, though for anyone even partly trained in statistics, it has very little educational value.
Of course, the title of this book and Huff’s little charade would seem to imply that all such operations are the product of intent to deceive. The intelligent reader would be skeptical — it is the unfortunate truth that it not chicanery much of the time, but incompetence. On the other hand, Huff is pretty clear that the ‘errors’ if that is what they are always seem to come down on the side of the interested party. As long as the errors remain one-sided, he says, it is not easy to attribute them to bungling or accident.
No More Mr. Nice Guy
After being fellow pirates for much of the book, in the concluding chapter Huff finally lets go if his pet charade and faces up to the more serious purpose of the book: explaining how to look a phony statistic in the eye and face it down; and no less important, how to recognize sound and usable data in that wilderness of fraud to which the previous chapters have been largely devoted. He lays down some thumb rules, which in the end comes come down to asking intelligent questions of the stats, especially of the conclusions. Asking such questions require the readers to be aware of the tendency of stats to mislead and to not be dazzled by the numbers.
Huff’s book is primarily an attempt to pull down the high estimation automatically awarded to anybody willing to quote numbers. It is a fun evening read for the expert, who may then roll his eyes and say that there is nothing of real value in the book. But as its popularity attests to, it seems to be an important book for the lay reader, just by serving a reminder that the pirates are still out there — wielding their charts.
Rating Of Books How to Lie with Statistics
Ratings: 3.87 From 9863 Users | 1035 ReviewsDiscuss Of Books How to Lie with Statistics
Noting that this book was published in 1954, one may instantly discount the information as outdated. However, there are recent events that can be related to some of the examples author Darrell Huff provides, and helps to increase the book's value.For those who have fleetingly or never studied statistics, this is a good place to start. It is a quick and easily understandable read, written in plain English and with plenty of examples to prove the author's points. Personally, I have studiedIt seems a little shallow to rate this semi-pamphlet at four stars, as one of the must-read books, but that's exactly what I'm going to do.This book earns four stars from me simply from its concisiveness and practicality. You can churn through this beauty in one sitting. It is entertaining, has excellent examples, introduces concepts in a wry, witty tone, and after ten years of courses, articles, books, and opinions, I have yet to learn a single thing about misleading statistics that wasn't
Clear, readable, and witty. This book, published in the 50s, is as relevant today as it was then.
It's a fun book to read. If you have some stats background every chapter would make you nod and scream "OMG! Been there! Done that..." It was first published in 1954, but it's still applicable today.It's a great read for those of you who never touched stats at all, as it shows common fallacies and tactics people can use to manipulate your thinking. It's especially easier when numbers are involved. E.g. people stop thinking critically when someone says some specific numbers: "98.87% of numbers
I still wonder why Trigonometry and Calculus are offered in high school, but Statistics is not. It's such a broad subject that is used in so many fields-even forgetting all of the numbers we read in magazines. I digress. This book specifically focuses on the facts and figures that we see everyday, pretty much everywhere. I thought it was well written and extremely thorough, going from problems that happen during study collection, to the cherry picking and presentation of data itself. I had to
I'm just going to quote the Amazon.com review:"There is terror in numbers," writes Darrell Huff in How to Lie with Statistics. And nowhere does this terror translate to blind acceptance of authority more than in the slippery world of averages, correlations, graphs, and trends. Huff sought to break through "the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind" with this slim volume, first published in 1954. The book remains relevant as a wake-up call for people unaccustomed to
This book was published in 1954, before Excel, and it hasn't been updated yet it's still being reissued. After reading this, I can only assume that B.E. (Before Excel) statistics were presented more often with illustrations rather than bar graphs and pie charts, which would just be weird now since it's so easy to prepare graphs in Excel. Or maybe the whole point of the book is that if you use illustrations you will be able to confuse your audience with more ease. Either way, I didn't really
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