How to Lie with Statistics: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:25, 14 November 2022

Revision as of 22:25, 14 November 2022

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The book is a brief, breezy illustrated volume outlining the [[misuse of statistics]] and errors in the interpretation of statistics, and how these errors may create incorrect conclusions.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it became a standard textbook introduction to the subject of statistics for many college students. It has become one of the best-selling statistics books in history, with over one and a half million copies sold in the English-language edition.<ref name="fiftyyears">[{{Cite web|url=http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Publications/PDF/TN148.pdf Darrell Huff and Fifty Years of ''How to Lie with Statistics''] {{Webarchive|urlarchiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20210223123134/http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Publications/PDF/TN148.pdf|deadurl=y|title=Darrell Huff and Fifty Years of ''How to Lie with Statistics''|datearchivedate=2021-02-February 23, 2021}}</ref> It has also been widely translated.

Themes of the book include "[[Correlation does not imply causation]]" and "Using [[random sampling]]". It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality, for example by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, so that differences seem larger than they are, or by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, so that the reader forgets that the images do not scale the same way the quantities do.