The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize… — Darrell Huff
The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical methods and statistical terms are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, "opinion" polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense.
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"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.
