It's all a little like the tale of a roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit… — Darrell Huff
It's all a little like the tale of a roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. "Well," he said, "I have to put in some horse meat too. But I mix 'em fifty-fifty: one horse, one rabbit."
Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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.
