Status Updates From How to Lie with Statistics

19 pages read in 22 min, via @leioapp (http://leio.co).

I do not know of any powerful group that is interested in making public spending appear to be smaller than it is.

And take the figures that show the suicide rate to be at its maximum in June. Do suicides produce June brides - or do June weddings precipitate suicides of the jilted? A somewhat more convincing (though equally unproved) explanation is that the fellow who licks his depression all through the winter with the thought that things will look rosier in the
spring gives up when June comes and he still feels terrible.

If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference.

Very interesting... I’ve seen these tricks so far but couldn’t have explained them as clearly.

It is dangerous to mention any subject having high emotional content without hastily saying whether you are for or agin it.

The quick case studies are nice.

More people were killed by airplanes last year than in 1910. Therefore modern planes are more dangerous? Nonsense. There are hundreds of times more people flying now, that’s all.

"As Henry G. Felsen, a humorist and no medical authority, pointed out quite a while ago, proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week."

.

So far, damn good.

Funny and insightful

Funny and insightful

About obvious things we overlook.

Proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.

-Henry G. Felsen

Reiterating a lot of things I've read in other books (Signal and the Noise, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Freakanomics). Although the other books were written after this one. So far it's an easy read on rudimentary statistics.

i got this book from the library to read for ap stat (as if school doesn't start this monday or anything) and it's a bit sticky (like, physically sticky) which is weirding me out a bit. more review to follow

Rediscovered and repurchased this book recently — I'd found a copy years ago and not, did it open my eyes to the power and potential misuse of statistics. Though written in the 50's, it's lessons hold true today and I would even call this required reading for anyone who wants to avoid being hoodwinked by slanted presentations of data.

If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing.

What? That's it? It just ends? I mean, that Mark Twain does wind it down to a nice comment, but that's rather abrupt.

Is that example of a lie a lie? 250k claimed cases of MS but "happily" death data indicates max 30-40k cases. Multiple sclerosis is not instantly fatal, so...

Heh. Note to self: "There may be something in what you say."

Okay, what am I missing? If Linda and Peter's scores are actually in the X to Y range, accounting for the probable error, then why is Huff talking in terms of their chances of being "above" or "below" those new max/min values?

Hmm. My education did not teach us that "average" is an umbrella term of which mean, median, and mode were types, though I was taught mean = average. Has there been a linguistic shift or is one of us incorrect? (Assuming me more than him.)

so many books, so little time

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