How to Lie with Statistics

⚡️ 10 Quotes from the book

“The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify.”

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“A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s ‘big lie’; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.”

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“The basic sample is the kind called ‘random’. It is selected by pure chance from the ‘universe’, a word by which the statistician means the whole of which the sample is a part.”

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“Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way, just as one hundred tossed pennies will rarely come up exactly fifty heads and fifty tails.”

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“The deceptive thing about the little figure that is not there is that its absence so often goes unnoticed. That, of course, is the secret of its success.”

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“Just to clear the air, let’s note first of all that whatever an intelligence test measures it is not quite the same thing as we usually mean by intelligence. It neglects such important things as leadership and creative imagination. It takes no account of social judgement or musical or artistic or other aptitudes, to say nothing of such personality matters as diligence and emotional balance.”

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“Sometimes the big ado is made about a difference that is mathematically real and demonstrable but so tiny as to have no importance. This is in defiance of the fine old saying that a difference is a difference only if it makes a difference.”

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“Permitting statistical treatment and the hypnotic presence of numbers and decimal points to befog causal relationships is little better than superstition.”

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“What comes full of virtue from the statistician’s desk may find itself twisted, exaggerated, over-simplified, and distorted-through-selection by salesman, public-relations expert, journalist, or advertising copywriter.”

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“Many a statistic is false on its face. It gets by only because the magic of numbers brings about a suspension of common sense.”

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