Statistical Fog

Huff, Darrell (1954) How to Lie with Statistics, W.W. Norton &Company Inc New York, New York, 142 PAGES

This is the 70^th anniversary of the biggest little book in academia and the wider community. How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff and illustrations by Irving Gees is that book. I read it for a class assignment in the early 60’s. It has sold millions and is still available on the Internet.

According to the author, “the secret language of statistics, so appealing to a fact minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify.”

Every word, picture, interpretation, and related are there to leave the reader with nonsense, that can even beat some research professionals. This does not mean that statistics are not valuable; it is just that it can cover over and fog what appears to be validity.

If there is a lie, a chart, picture, graph, or interpretation the presentation can make it nearly valid. Most folks don’t understand stats and a detach graph or picture can make nonsense seem to be true. So one uses many strategies to win the war over something else. So we mix the mean with the median in the same sentence. Arranging a sentence with interval and ratio measures can also be helpful. One can patch together a “gee whiz” graph and all is well.

Statistics are still very valuable, but you got to know the big picture (the field of statistics and research) to wade through it all. By the way, all the above comes before the computer was born and did its manipulations on numbers.

I paid $1.95 for my copy back then.

Prof. Joel Charles Snell

Kirkwood College

joelsnell@hotmail.com

joelsnell.com