"Another thing to watch out for is a conclusion in which a correlation has been inferred to continue beyond the data with which it has been demonstrated." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
"Extrapolations are useful, particularly in the form of soothsaying called forecasting trends. But in looking at the figures or the charts made from them, it is necessary to remember one thing constantly: The trend to now may be a fact, but the future trend represents no more than an educated guess. Implicit in it is 'everything else being equal' and 'present trends continuing'. And somehow everything else refuses to remain equal." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
"If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the something. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
"Keep in mind that a correlation may be real and based on real cause and effect -and still be almost worthless in determining action in any single case." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
"Only when there is a substantial number of trials involved is the law of averages a useful description or prediction." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
"Percentages offer a fertile field for confusion. And like the ever-impressive decimal they can lend an aura of precision to the inexact. […] Any percentage figure based on a small number of cases is likely to be misleading. It is more informative to give the figure itself. And when the percentage is carried out to decimal places, you begin to run the scale from the silly to the fraudulent." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
"Place little faith in an average or a graph or a trend when those important figures are missing." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
"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." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
"The fact is that, despite its mathematical base,
statistics is as much an art as it is a science. A great many manipulations and
even distortions are possible within the bounds of propriety. Often the
statistician must choose among methods, a subjective process, and find the one
that he will use to represent the facts."
"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." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with
Statistics", 1954)
"The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a
fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and
oversimplify. Statistical methods and statistical terms are necessary in
reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with
honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can
only be semantic nonsense."
"There are often many ways of expressing any figure. […] The method is to choose the one that sounds best for the purpose at hand and trust that few who read it will recognize how imperfectly it reflects the situation." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
"To be worth much, a report based on sampling must use a
representative sample, which is one from which every source of bias has been
removed."
"When numbers in tabular form are taboo and words will not
do the work well as is often the case. There is one answer left: Draw a
picture. About the simplest kind of statistical picture or graph, is the line
variety. It is very useful for showing trends, something practically everybody is
interested in showing or knowing about or spotting or deploring or forecasting."
"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. [...]
"When you find somebody - usually an interested party - making a fuss about a correlation, look first of all to see if it is not one of this type, produced by the stream of events, the trend of the times." (Darell Huff, "How to Lie with Statistics", 1954)
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