How to Lie with Statistics

In the end it was found that if you wanted to know what certain people read it was no use asking them. You could learn a good deal more by going to their houses and saying you wanted to buy old magazines and what could be had?

The test of the random sample is this: Does every name or thing in the whole group have an equal chance to be in the sample? The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with entire confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one thing wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer c

Author Louis Bromfield is said to have a stock reply to critical correspondents when his mail becomes too heavy for individual attention. Without conceding anything and without encouraging further correspondence, it still satisfies almost everyone. The key sentence: “There may be something in what you say.”

More people were killed by airplanes last year than in 1910. Therefore modern planes are more dangerous? Nonsense. There are hundreds of times more people flying now, that’s all.

What’s Missing?

To say “almost one and one-half” and to be heard as “three”—that’s what the one-dimensional picture can accomplish.

When you are told that something is an average you still don’t know very much about it unless you can find out which of the common kinds of average it is—mean, median, or mode.

It is the illusion of the shifting base that accounts for the trickiness of adding discounts. When a hardware jobber offers “50% and 20% off list,” he doesn’t mean a seventy percent discount. The cut is sixty percent since the twenty percent is figured on the smaller base left after taking off fifty percent.

It is sad truth that conclusions from such samples, biased or too small or both, lie behind much of what we read or think we know.

The importance of using a small group is this: With a large group any difference produced by chance is likely to be a small one and unworthy of big type. A two-peracent-improvement claim is not going to sell much tooth-paste.