What comes full of virtue from the statistician's desk may find itself twisted, exaggerated, oversimplified… — Darrell Huff
What comes full of virtue from the statistician's desk may find itself twisted, exaggerated, oversimplified, and distorted-through-selection by salesman, public-relations expert, journalist, or advertising copywriter. [...] As long as the errors remain one-sided, it is not easy to attribute them to bungling and accident.
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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.
