How to Lie with Statistics is Darrell Huff's perennially best-selling[1] introduction to statistics for the general reader. Written in 1954, it is a brief, breezy, illustrated volume outlining the common errors, both intentional and unintentional, associated with the interpretation of statistics and how these errors lead to biased or inaccurate conclusions.
Over time is has become the most widely read statistics book in history and over one-half million copies have been sold in the English language edition alone. In 2003 the Department of Economics of Shanghai University published an edition in Chinese. The most recent edition — Mentire con le statistiche – was published in Italian in June 2007.
Some themes of the book are "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using Random Sampling". It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality:
- By truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, one makes differences seem larger than they are
- By representing one-dimensional quantities by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes, one makes the reader forget that the images don't scale the same way the quantities do.
Chapters
- The Sample with the Built-in Bias
- The Well-Chosen Average
- The Little Figures That Are Not There
- Much Ado about Practically Nothing
- The Gee-Whiz Graph
- The One-Dimensional Picture
- The Semi-attached Figure
- Post Hoc Rides Again
- How to Statisticulate
- How to Talk Back to a Statistic
Notes and references
- ^ "Over the last fifty years, How to Lie with Statistics has sold more copies than any other statistical text." J.M. Steele. "Darrell Huff and Fifty Years of How to Lie with Statistics. Statistical Science, 20 (3), 2005, 205–209.
See also
External Links
- How to lie and cheat with statistics - like the book, this article explains how not to get cheated by other people who are trying to mislead you
 | This article about a mathematical publication is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |