How to Lie With Statistics (1954)

50 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by jruohonen

8 Comments

matthorse

2 hours ago

Amazing that after 70 years a lot of these practices are still in use and people fall for them. My favorite example are bar charts with truncated axis that are made to show extraordinary growth. But, as is well known, data doesn't matter as much as how you present it (or how much you hide)

vavooom

4 hours ago

One of my favorite things published of all time! Helped convince me to become a Statistics major when going into college.

lelanthran

4 hours ago

This is probably the best book on statistics you can give to a student of statistics.

I was under the impression that it is now out of print.

xnx

3 hours ago

Lying with statistics is a subset of the practice of lying with numbers. My [least] favorite trick to lie with numbers is to provide numbers without any context (e.g. "this datacenter uses 1 million gallons of water per year").

SirFatty

4 hours ago

This book is still in print, why are you sharing a pdf copy?

jruohonen

4 hours ago

Corrected, thanks, though a 1954 copy, but a lot of copies online. A good one, nevertheless (i.e., something you might actually pay for a paper copy).

tourmalinetaco

4 hours ago

Why not? Darrell Huff died in 2001, and under any respectable copyright system his work would have ended up in the public domain in 1979, or at least with his death.