How to Lie With Statistics
Author: Darrell Huff, Irving Geis
List Price: $11.95
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ISBN: 0393310728
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company (November, 1993)
Sales Rank: 2,010
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
A primer on healthy caution
Since our schools regularly let us through without a single course in statistics, this book is for the general reader who is in peril of learning facts that aren't facts. It won't teach you statistics, but it will teach you what to look out for when you read the paper and see numbers and graphs. Since most institutions who report these data care little whether they are accurate or significant, you must rely on yourself to determine whether they are good numbers.The problems with statistical data are still relevant today, and it is shocking to realize how contemporary many of his examples seem. The problems of bias, averaging, and confusing correlation with causation all dupe even the most well-educated people, and the advantage lies with the person who can spot fallacies and not be fooled. While learning statistics would be ideal, this book shows the first step towards understanding and critiquing statistical data. It is not longer or more complicated than it should be, and is simple to understand. Still, if you don't know how to evaluate some of the simple data that you come by every day in the news, this book will provide you with infinite wisdom.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Excellent common sense guide to how Statisitics are abused
This book is an excellent guide to how statistics are manipulated and misused. Speaking as a professional statistician I recommend it highly. Very readable and entertaining, the book goes through the basic ways in which statistics are misrepresented, and how a little common sense can (very often) reveal when extravagant claims are being made. This books is a little dated now (it was written in 1954) but very much worth reading - the ways statistics are manipulated haven't changed much. This book is not a textbook of statistics and is not aimed at college students. Rather, it is aimed at high school students and members of the general public who want to be on their guard against being manipulated by advertising and "studies". The last chapter ("How to talk back to a Statistic") should be required reading for anyone who reads a newspaper or an advertisement. More than anything else, this book teaches how to apply a little common sense to test wild statistical claims.
Rating: 5 out of 5
An Entertaining Primer on the Validity of Statistics
Although "How to Lie with Statistics" is a bit dated (having been written in the 1950's), the principles it puts forth are still valid today--if not moreso than ever--and the material is delivered in clear, concise, and even entertaining anecdotes and illustrations.How often do you hear statistics bandied about in the media or used to try to prove some special-interest point? "Of course" the people quoting the figures must be right with numbers on their sides... until you look at just how those numbers were arrived at.
This book isn't truly a guide on how to lie with statistics, but it is an excellent text that informs the reader both how others will lie to them using statistics and on how to interpret the validity of purported statistical data.
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