How to Lie with Statistics

How to Lie with Statistics (1954) by Darrell Huff (July 15,1913 – June 27, 2001) is an introduction to statistics for the general reader. It uses a breezy, non-mathematical approach to making sense of statistics, and to recognizing nonsense when you see it. This is the best-selling statistics book of all time.

Quotes

Quotations taken from the 31^st printing of the 1954 W. W. Norton edition; ISBN 0-393-05264-8 (cloth), ISBN 0-393-09426-X (paperback)

Currently available in the 1993 W. W. Norton edition; ISBN 0-393-31072-8 (paperback)

Introduction

The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical methods and statistical terms are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, "opinion" polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense.

A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's "big lie"; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.

Chapter 1: The Sample With the Built-in Bias

Who are those who chucked the questionnaire into the nearest wastebasket?

Even if you can't find a source of demonstrable bias, allow yourself some degree of skepticism about the results as long as there is a possibility of bias somewhere. There always is.

Chapter 3: The Little Figures That Are Not There

This [the degree of significance] is the little figure that is not there—on the assumption that you, the lay reader, wouldn't understand it. Or that, where there is an axe to grind, you would.

It is all too reminiscent of an old definition of the lecture method of classroom instruction: a process by which the contents of the textbook of the instructor are transferred to the notebook of the student without passing through the heads of either party.

Chapter 5: The Gee-Whiz Graph

There is terror in numbers. [...] Perhaps we suffer from a trauma induced by grade-school arithmetic.

Nothing has been falsified—except the impression that it gives.

Chapter 7: The Semiattached Figure

If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anyone will notice the difference.

Chapter 9: How to Statisticulate

The president of the American Statistical Association once called me down for that. Not chicanery much of the time, said he, but incompetence. There may be something in what he says, but I am not certain that one assumption will be less offensive to statisticians than the other.

What comes full of virtue from the statistician's desk may find itself twisted, exaggerated, oversimplified, and distorted-through-selection by salesman, public-relations expert, journalist, or advertising copywriter. [...] As long as the errors remain one-sided, it is not easy to attribute them to bungling and accident.

It's all a little like the tale of a roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. "Well," he said, "I have to put in some horse meat too. But I mix 'em fifty-fifty: one horse, one rabbit."

Chapter 10: How to Talk Back to a Statistic

"Does it make sense?" will often cut a statistic down to size when the whole rigmarole is based on an unproven assumption.

Quotes about How to Lie with Statistics

There is some irony to the world’s most famous statistics book having been written by a person with no formal training in statistics, but there is also some logic to how this came to be. Huff had a thorough training for excellence in communication, and he had an exceptional commitment to doing things for himself. [...] In the publishing field, this is what one means by pioneering, original work.
- J.M. Steele, "Darrell Huff and Fifty Years of How to Lie with Statistics", Statistical Science, 20 (3), 2005, 205–209.

External links

Encyclopedic article on How to Lie with Statistics on Wikipedia
Encyclopedic article on Darrell Huff on Wikipedia
J.M. Steele, "Darrell Huff and Fifty Years of How to Lie with Statistics" [1]