how to lie with statistics by darrell huff

For example, Huff’s activities with the cigarette companies are not mentioned on his Wikipedia page (as of ), nor are they mentioned in an article on Huff by probabilist J. This was all a surprise to me, and I suspect to other statisticians as well. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent Surgeon General’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies.” Huff peppered his attack with with amusing asides and anecdotes, lampooning spurious correlations like that between the size of Dutch families and the number of storks nesting on rooftops–which proves not that storks bring babies but rather that people with large families tend to have larger houses (which therefore attract more storks). John Mashey points to this, from Robert Proctor’s book, “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition”:ĭarrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie With Statistics, was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. Critically acclaimed by media outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and recommended by Bill Gates as a perfect beach listen, How to Lie With Statistics stands as the go-to book for understanding the use of statistics by teachers and leaders everywhere.Remember How to Lie With Statistics? It turns out that the author worked for the cigarette companies. Levitt's Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Huff runs the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic probes such things as the sample study, the tabulation method, the interview technique, and the way the results are derived from the figures and points up the countless number of dodges that are used to full rather than to inform. Originally published in 1954, it remains as relevant and necessary as ever in our digital world, where information is king - and as easy to distort and manipulate as it is to access.Ī precursor to modern popular science books like Steven D. Now available in audio for the first time!ĭarrell Huff's celebrated classic How to Lie With Statistics is a straightforward and engaging guide to understanding the manipulation and misrepresentation of information that could be lurking behind every graph, chart, and infographic.

How to lie with statistics by darrell huff