How to Lie With Statistics Book Review
How to Lie with Statistics Book Summary
The book How to Lie with Statistics written by Darrell Huff shows you how statistics are used to mislead; sometimes unintentionally, other times on purpose. It gives the readers the knowledge necessary to intelligently question and understand the story behind the numbers. In other words, it shows the tricks the crooks use, so that honest men can use this knowledge for self defense.
I think it’s particularly useful for a manager or an executive to read and understand this book, because they are usually presented with a lot of numbers, graphs and charts and are expected to make decisions based on these numbers. People collecting and presenting the numbers to management could employ some of the tricks explained in this book and therefore, we should be careful when basing our decisions on those numbers.
It’s interesting that although this book was written in 1954, the concepts explained are just as pertinent today. Some salary figures seem to be outdated but the tricks remain pretty much the same.
The book starts with explaining the importance of sample selection and built-in bias. Sampling is critical in statistics because we can’t always count or observe every item in a population and therefore have to base our judgments on a selected sample. However, a sample with a built-in bias could dramatically change the results. When examining survey results, you should keep in mind that people who complete the surveys are different than those who didn’t respond to the survey and those who respond tend to over or understate the truth. The method of survey and/or the interviewer also impacts the results. Another very important factor is the sample size. If you toss a penny only 4 times, you could get 4 heads. Obviously, from this result you shouldn’t decide that you would get a head every time you toss a coin. Small samples could be very misleading and you should try to find out what the sample size is before making your
The book How to Lie with Statistics written by Darrell Huff shows you how statistics are used to mislead; sometimes unintentionally, other times on purpose. It gives the readers the knowledge necessary to intelligently question and understand the story behind the numbers. In other words, it shows the tricks the crooks use, so that honest men can use this knowledge for self defense.
I think it’s particularly useful for a manager or an executive to read and understand this book, because they are usually presented with a lot of numbers, graphs and charts and are expected to make decisions based on these numbers. People collecting and presenting the numbers to management could employ some of the tricks explained in this book and therefore, we should be careful when basing our decisions on those numbers.
It’s interesting that although this book was written in 1954, the concepts explained are just as pertinent today. Some salary figures seem to be outdated but the tricks remain pretty much the same.
The book starts with explaining the importance of sample selection and built-in bias. Sampling is critical in statistics because we can’t always count or observe every item in a population and therefore have to base our judgments on a selected sample. However, a sample with a built-in bias could dramatically change the results. When examining survey results, you should keep in mind that people who complete the surveys are different than those who didn’t respond to the survey and those who respond tend to over or understate the truth. The method of survey and/or the interviewer also impacts the results. Another very important factor is the sample size. If you toss a penny only 4 times, you could get 4 heads. Obviously, from this result you shouldn’t decide that you would get a head every time you toss a coin. Small samples could be very misleading and you should try to find out what the sample size is before making your