Darrell Huff How To Lie With Statistics Summary

Darrell Huff masterfully writes How to Lie With Statistics which covers many of the statistic gathering and displaying methods used today, from carefully picked averages to well chosen samples. He does not simply discuss these methods, however. He spectacularly demonstrates how companies, colleges, and quite often media sources use these tools to manipulate data into their favor. While it may appear to be fairly outdated to the casual reader, Darrell Huff's book still applies today, over sixty years after it was first published. Almost all of the concepts in this book apply directly to what we will be studying in the next four and a half months in our statistics course. This book teaches the reader the kinds of faulty statistics, whether …show more content…
The term "average" could be the mean, median, or mode of the data. These three calculations of an average will sometimes result in very different ideas of what the collected data means. Another interesting fact is that when collecting probability of some occurrence it is critical to have many trials. The reason for this is that chance will play a much larger role in smaller samples than in larger samples. A coin may be found to land on tails one hundred percent of the time if it is only flipped twice, but the more the coin is flipped the more the percentage of tails will move towards fifty percent. Yet another interesting concept found in this book is the Post Hoc fallacy. The Post Hoc fallacy basically states that if one action follows another, then the first action caused the second. Another interesting fact is that it is common in covariations for it to be unclear which event causes the other. In some of these cases, the events change places or are both the cause and effect of each other as in the case of the positive correlation between income and stock