How Not To Lie With Statistics:Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics is perhaps more relevant than ever. In this short article, I revisit this theme from some different angles.
"What is truth?" and "What is a lie?" are questions that have drawn the attention of philosophers, theologians, legal scholars and intellectuals of many kinds for centuries. I am not a scholar or intellectual, merely a hardhat statistician working in marketing research and what is vaguely called data science. Regardless of what we do for a living, however, all of us are consumers of statistics at work and in our daily lives. “Statistics” can refer to figures or mathematical models, and either can be used to deceive us, are often misinterpreted or can be flat out wrong.
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