Darrell Huff's 1954 classic still shows how numbers fool the unwary
How to Lie With Statistics (1954)
The Internet Archive hosts Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics, the 1954 book that taught generations to distrust charts and averages. Huff walks through sample studies, tabulation methods, interview techniques, and the ways results get wrung from figures, cataloging the countless dodges used to mislead rather than inform. The scanned edition runs 152 pages and remains a free, borrowable reference for anyone who reads a statistic and wonders what it hides.
Huff runs the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic and points up the countless number of dodges which are used to fool rather than inform.
- matthorse
Amazing that after 70 years a lot of these practices are still in use and people fall for them. My favorite example are bar charts with truncated axis that are made to show extraordinary growth. But, as is well known, data doesn't matter as much as how you present it (or how much you hide)
- vavooom
One of my favorite things published of all time! Helped convince me to become a Statistics major when going into college.
- realsarm
If anyone interested to listen to a podcast about the book https://nouswise.com/c/8a6439ca-fee7-4401-8ef3-b92a823cfd2a?...