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Lies, Damned Lies, or Statistics: How to Tell the Truth with Statistics by Jonathan A. Poritz is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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Mark Twain’s autobiography [TNA10] modestly questions his own reporting of thenumbers of hours per day he sat down to write, and of the number of words he wrote in thattime, sayingFigures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of themmyself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often applywith justice and force:“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”[emphasis added]Here Twain gives credit for this pithy tripartite classification of lies to Benjamin Disraeli, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1868 (under Queen Victoria),although modern scholars find no evidence that Disraeli was the actual originator of thephrase. But whoever actually deserves credit for the phrase, it does seem that statistics areoften used to conceal the truth, rather than to reveal it. So much so, for example, that thewonderful book How to Lie with Statistics [Huf93], by Darrell Huff, gives many, manyexamples of misused statistics, and yet merely scratches the surface.We contend, however, that statistics are not a type of lie, but rather, when used carefully,are an alternative to lying. For this reason, we use “or” in the title of this b

Who reads Lies, Damned Lies, or Statistics: How to Tell the Truth with Statistics?

Author

Jonathan A. Poritz

Publisher

Department of Mathematics and Physics, Colorado State University

Published

2017

Language

EN

Category

nonfiction