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Title: How to Lie With Statistics Authors: Darrell Huff Category:books Number of Highlights: 5 Date: 2025-04-04 Last Highlighted: 2025-04-04
Highlights
proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week. (67)
Tags:saying,perspective,wisdom
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 cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling. (171)
Tags:statistics
The operation of a poll comes down in the end to a running battle against sources of bias, and this battle is conducted all the time by all the reputable polling organizations. What the reader of the reports must remember is that the battle is never won. No conclusion that “sixty-seven percent of the American people are against” something or other should be read without the lingering question, Sixty-seven percent of which American people? (185)
Tags:statistics,perspective
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. (329)
Only when there is a substantial number of trials involved is the law of averages a useful description or prediction. (337)
Tags:math,statistics
---- Sometimes the big ado is made about a difference that is mathematically real and demonstrable but so tiny as to have no importance. This is in defiance of the fine old saying that a difference is a difference only if it makes a difference. (Location 490)
- It’s all a little like the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. “Well,” he said, “I have to put in some horse meat too. But I mix ’em fifty-fifty: one horse, one rabbit.” (Location 966)statisticsmathlol
- Note: A joke about statistics