The president of the American Statistical Association once called me down for that. Not chicanery much of the… — Darrell Huff
The president of the American Statistical Association once called me down for that. Not chicanery much of the time, said he, but incompetence. There may be something in what he says, but I am not certain that one assumption will be less offensive to statisticians than the other.
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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.
