How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff & Irving Geis

Author:Darrell Huff & Irving Geis [Huff, Darrell]
Language: rus
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Norton
Published: 1993-10-16T18:00:00+00:00

You have achieved something remarkable by careful use of a semiattached figure. The worse things get, the better your poll makes them look.

Or take this one: “27 per cent of a large sample of eminent physicians smoke Throaties—more than any other brand.” The figure itself may be phony, of course, in any of several ways, but that really doesn’t make any difference. The only answer to a figure so irrelevant is “So what?” With all proper respect toward the medical profession, do doctors know any more about tobacco brands than you do? Do they have any inside information that permits them to choose the least harmful among cigarettes? Of course they don’t, and your doctor would be the first to say so. Yet that “27 per cent” somehow manages to sound as if it meant something.

Now slip back one per cent and consider the case of the juice extractor. It was widely advertised as a device that “extracts 26 per cent more juice” as “proved by laboratory test” and “vouched for by Good Housekeeping Institute.”

That sounds right good. If you can buy a juicer that is twenty-six per cent more effective, why buy any other kind? Well now, without going into the fact that “laboratory tests” (especially “independent laboratory tests”) have proved some of the darndest things, just what does that figure mean? Twenty-six per cent more than what? When it was finally pinned down it was found to mean only that this juicer got out that much more juice than an old-fashioned hand reamer could. It had absolutely nothing to do with the data you would want before purchasing; this juicer might be the poorest on the market. Besides being suspiciously precise, that twenty-six per cent figure is totally irrelevant.

Advertisers aren’t the only people who will fool you with numbers if you let them. An article on driving safety, published by This Week magazine undoubtedly with your best interests at heart, told you what might happen to you if you went “hurtling down the highway at 70 miles an hour, careening from side to side.” You would have, the article said, four times as good a chance of staying alive if the time were seven in the morning than if it were seven at night. The evidence: “Four times more fatalities occur on the highways at 7 P.M. than at 7 A.M.” Now that is approximately true, but the conclusion doesn’t follow. More people are killed in the evening than in the morning simply because more people are on the highways then to be killed. You, a single driver, may be in greater danger in the evening, but there is nothing in the figures to prove it either way.

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