Mark Twain famously remarked that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.* As the last chapter explained, most phenomena that we care about can be described in multiple ways. Once there are multiple ways of describing the same thing (e.g., “he’s got a great personality” or “he was convicted of securities fraud”), the descriptive statistics that we choose to use (or not to use) will have a profound impact on the impression that we leave. Someone with nefarious motives can use perfectly good facts and figures to support entirely disputable or illegitimate conclusions.
