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How to Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff

Not a day goes by that most of us aren't presented with a graph, or a chart, or a poll by either a politician, a salesman or a newscaster - these all purport to tell us one thing, but on closer inspection many turn out to do nothing of the sort. Too high a proportion of too many of these glossy presentations don't really say what they purport to sa... (See the whole review)

(Added by Peter Cresswell on 9/07/2004, 8:38pm)

Discuss this Book (2 messages)

Wednesday, September 8, 2004 - 4:05pm

You might be interested to know that my father always referred to statistics as "guess math."

My appreciation of this witticism grew when I read, in an introduction to a statistics textbook some years ago, a reference to a study which concluded that approx. 40% of the statistical papers read by the conductor of the study were questionable on methodological grounds.

Saturday, September 18, 2004 - 10:17am

Interesting Peter. Thanks.

I will have to look it up.

I remember a lesson at school once where the maths teacher got us to collect any statistics we found in newspapers and magazines etc.

We went through all of them and always found distortions or falsehoods.

I was quite shocked at the time. But after a while you become so bombarded by the stuff you forget about it again. It is good to remain vigilant!