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How to Lie with Statistics

Darrell Huff

Paperback | Pages: 142 pages

Rating: 3.87 | 9863 Users | 1035 Reviews

Particularize Books As How to Lie with Statistics

Original Title:	How to Lie With Statistics
ISBN:	0393310728 (ISBN13: 9780393310726)
Edition Language:	English

Narration Supposing Books How to Lie with Statistics

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: The Pirates of the Powerpoint

Darrell Huff uses a simple, but effective literary device to impress his readers about how much statistics affect their daily lives and their understanding of the world.

He does this by pretending that the book is a sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive, like a manual for swindlers, or better, for pirates. He then pretends to justify the crookedness of the book in the manner of the retired burglar whose published reminiscences amounted to a graduate course in how to pick a lock and muffle a footfall: The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense.

This keeps the book interesting and entertaining, though for anyone even partly trained in statistics, it has very little educational value.

Of course, the title of this book and Huff’s little charade would seem to imply that all such operations are the product of intent to deceive. The intelligent reader would be skeptical — it is the unfortunate truth that it not chicanery much of the time, but incompetence. On the other hand, Huff is pretty clear that the ‘errors’ if that is what they are always seem to come down on the side of the interested party. As long as the errors remain one-sided, he says, it is not easy to attribute them to bungling or accident.

No More Mr. Nice Guy

After being fellow pirates for much of the book, in the concluding chapter Huff finally lets go if his pet charade and faces up to the more serious purpose of the book: explaining how to look a phony statistic in the eye and face it down; and no less important, how to recognize sound and usable data in that wilderness of fraud to which the previous chapters have been largely devoted. He lays down some thumb rules, which in the end comes come down to asking intelligent questions of the stats, especially of the conclusions. Asking such questions require the readers to be aware of the tendency of stats to mislead and to not be dazzled by the numbers.

Huff’s book is primarily an attempt to pull down the high estimation automatically awarded to anybody willing to quote numbers. It is a fun evening read for the expert, who may then roll his eyes and say that there is nothing of real value in the book. But as its popularity attests to, it seems to be an important book for the lay reader, just by serving a reminder that the pirates are still out there — wielding their charts.

Be Specific About Regarding Books How to Lie with Statistics

Title	:	How to Lie with Statistics
Author	:	Darrell Huff
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 142 pages
Published	:	September 1st 1982 by W. W. Norton & Company (first published 1954)
Categories	:	Nonfiction. Science. Business. Mathematics. Economics

Rating Regarding Books How to Lie with Statistics

Ratings: 3.87 From 9863 Users | 1035 Reviews

Crit Regarding Books How to Lie with Statistics

First few chapters made sense. Post that, I started questioning my own reasons for picking this up in the first place. While it's a small book already, it's summary would have sufficed just as well.

In class 5 or 6, when we first started doing maths of finding average, mean or mode, I really had no idea what they meant or even why I was doing them. Just sum up the numbers, divide by their number and get the average or arrange them in increasing order, take the number in the middle - what they meant even. Maybe I was just following the instructions because the books said so or doing things this way will bring me marks in the exam. That's it. No more thoughts. Later when we learnt regression

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: The Pirates of the Powerpoint Darrell Huff uses a simple, but effective literary device to impress his readers about how much statistics affect their daily lives and their understanding of the world. He does this by pretending that the book is a sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive, like a manual for swindlers, or better, for pirates. He then pretends to justify the crookedness of the book in the manner of the retired burglar whose published

This is one of those rare books I would recommend to almost anyone. It's clear, concise, funny, not too complex, and above all important for anyone who wants to understand politics, economics, science, or life in general. Statistical analysis is so vital to determining how things actually stand and where we should be moving that people lacking awareness of basic logical/statistical fallacies are doomed to live within delusions. Being informed necessitates understanding and being skeptical of

Short-read but points out clearly with examples the numerous fallacies of statistical interpretation that one can easily be tricked into thinking.



I love the title. The content feels outdated. I think people lie with statistics much better today than when this was published. Yay, we're improving!