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Greenwald.js (talk | contribs) m Added other Books by Darrell Huff. Deleted biased words "breezy" and "humerus". Added a link with more reviews. |
"breezy" has exactly the right connotation. Cf. ref#1: "In a word, Huff’s style was—breezy. A statistically trained reader may even find it to be breezy to a fault, but..." |
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'''''How to Lie with Statistics''''' is a book written by [[Darrell Huff]] in 1954 presenting an introduction to [[statistics]] for the general reader. Huff was a journalist who wrote many "how to" articles as a freelancer, but was not a statistician.
The book is a brief, breezy, illustrated volume outlining errors when it comes to 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">"Over the last fifty years, How to Lie with Statistics has sold more copies than any other statistical text." J. M. Steele. "[http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Publications/PDF/TN148.pdf Darrell Huff and Fifty Years of ''How to Lie with Statistics'']. ''Statistical Science'', 20 (3), 2005, 205–209.</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.
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