How to Lie with Statistics

Darrell Huff

ISBN 10: 0393052648 / ISBN 13: 9780393052640

Published by R.S. Means Company, 1954

About this Item

Now available in audio for the first time Darrell Huff's celebrated classic How to Lie with Statistics is a straight-forward and engaging guide to understanding the manipulation and misrepresentation of information that could be lurking behind every graph, chart, and infographic. Originally published in 1954, it remains as relevant and necessary as ever in our digital world where information is king--and as easy to distort and manipulate as it is to access. A precursor to modern popular science books like Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Huff runs the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic, probes such things as the sample study, the tabulation method, the interview technique, or the way the results are derived from the figures, and points up the countless number of dodges which are used to full rather than to inform. Critically acclaimed by media outlets like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, How to Lie with Statistics stands as the go-to book for understanding the use of statistics by teachers and leaders everywhere.

Seller Inventory # 00108442716

Bibliographic Details

• Title: How to Lie with Statistics
• Publisher: R.S. Means Company
• Publication Date: 1954
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393052648
• ISBN 13: 9780393052640
• Binding: Hardback
• Illustrator: Irving Geis
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

A brief, breezy, illustrated volume which is the best-selling statistics book of all time.

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 examining the endless flow of numbers pouring from Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and everywhere else someone has an axe to grind, a point to prove, or a product to sell. "The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify," warns Huff.

Although many of the examples used in the book are charmingly dated, the cautions are timeless. Statistics are rife with opportunities for misuse, from "gee-whiz graphs" that add nonexistent drama to trends, to "results" detached from their method and meaning, to statistics' ultimate bugaboo--faulty cause-and-effect reasoning. Huff's tone is tolerant and amused, but no-nonsense. Like a lecturing father, he expects you to learn something useful from the book, and start applying it every day. Never be a sucker again, he cries!

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.

Read How to Lie with Statistics. Whether you encounter statistics at work, at school, or in advertising, you'll remember its simple lessons. Don't be terrorized by numbers, Huff implores. "The fact is that, despite its mathematical base, statistics is as much an art as it is a science." --Therese Littleton