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How to Lie with Statistics

View the article here How to Lie with Statistics is a book written by Darrell Huff in 1954 presenting an introduction to statistics for the general reader. 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. It has become one of the most widely read statistics books in history (even though Huff was not a statistician), with over one and a half million copies sold in the English-language edition [1]. It has also been widely translated. 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, for example by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, so that differences seem larger than they are, or by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, so that the reader forgets that the images don't scale the same way the quantities do...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sex Offender Issues on March 07, 2009 (boomark / email).