If you can’t prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference. The semiattached figure is a device guaranteed to stand you in good stead. It always has.
Darrell Huff in his 1954 classic, “How To Lie With Statistics”. The book ends with a brilliant quote from Mark Twain:
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
blog comments powered by Disqus
