In our “science-backed” society, we are inundated with statistics. “The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify.” This book is well worth a couple hours of your time.A great reminder of the basic principles of statistics and how they are often violated in the data we use and see in work, the news, and our personal lives.īuy this book on Amazon(Highly recommend)Īccess My Searchable Collection of 100+ Book Notes Key Takeaways Learn and be cautious with statistics In addition humor runs from the beginning (the dedication is “To my wife with good reason”) to the end (on page 135, Huff says “Almost anybody can claim to be first in something if he is not too particular what it is”). He also mentions that colleagues have told him that the flurry of meaningless statistics is due to incompetence–he dispatches this argument with a simple query: “Why, then, do the numbers almost always favor the person quoting them?” Huff also provides five questions (not unlike the five d’s of dodgeball) for readers to ask, when confronted with a statistic:Īll this is wrapped up in a book with simple examples (no math beyond arithmetic, really) and quaint 1950s prose. The fundamental lesson I learned from this book is that mathematical calculation involves a whole set of conditions, and any number derived from such a calculation is meaningless without understanding those conditions.
Usually to end arguments–after all, who can argue with “facts”? Huff shows how the same set of numbers can be tweaked to show three different outcomes, depending on where you start and what you use.
The cachet of numbers are used all the time in modern society. How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrel Huff, should be required reading for everyone.
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