Makarareth > Makarareth's Quotes

“a difference is a difference only if it makes a difference.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so. —Artemus Ward”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Just to clear the air, let's note first of all that whatever an intelligence test measures it is not quite the same thing as we usually mean by intelligence. It neglects such important things as leadership and creative imagination. It takes no account of social judgement or musical or artistic or other aptitudes, to say nothing of such personality matters as diligence and emotional balance.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s “big lie” it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things 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.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way, just as one hundred tossed pennies will rarely come up exactly fifty heads and fifty tails.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“IF YOU can’t prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference. The semiattached figure is a device guaranteed to stand you in good stead. It always has.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“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.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics

“How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let’s check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.”
― Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics