142 pages
English language
Published Dec. 24, 1993 by Norton.
Both charming and informative about how statistics are misused. Published long ago, but the tricks haven't changed.
Darrell Huff runs the gamut of every popularly used type of statistic, probes such things as the sample study, the tabulation method, the interview technique, or the way the results are derived from the figures, and points up the countless number of dodges which are used to fool rather than to inform.
Un librillo breve y entretenido que nos recuerda las formas más típicas de tergiversar datos: métricas que no dicen nada, comparaciones con rivales desconocidos, escalas truncadas, correlaciones espurias... Sin decir nada realmente profundo, es destacable que no haya perdido vigencia en sus casi 70 años. Estaría muy bien como lectura para los chavales de Secundaria.
Good info, mildly amusing, pretty dated. I mean, that last one is obvious, but I'm putting it out there in case you missed it somehow.
Pretty good. Research Methods prof brought it up as something of a joke, but it was only about $6 at Amazon and I had to order the class books anyway, so what the hell. Good, gentle reintroduction to stats, something I haven't had a class in since 19-mumble.
A couple things struck me about this book related to its 1954 pub date. One was that, based on examples he was citing of advertisers and corporations lying with stats, things were a lot looser back then! You could get away with stuff (apparently) that you really couldn't now. More subtle these days. The other was a lament about how then-modern journalists were just being stenographers for government and industry and not actually investigating claims that were being made - it's the same 60 years later!!
