If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend they are the same thing. In… — Darrell Huff
If you can't prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anyone will notice the difference.
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More from this book
"Does it make sense?" will often cut a statistic down to size when the whole rigmarole is based on an unproven assumption.
Even if you can't find a source of demonstrable bias, allow yourself some degree of skepticism about the results as long as there is a possibility of bias somewhere. There always is.
There is terror in numbers. [...] Perhaps we suffer from a trauma induced by grade-school arithmetic.
