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Comment by r4um | Hacker News Reader

Another good curation https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/mks/statmistakes/StatisticsM...

How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics

Those interested in How to Lie with Statistics may also enjoy Huff's other book, How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, commissioned by the tobacco industry in the 60s to fight the growing evidence that smoking causes cancer. It was never published, but I compiled the surviving manuscript and wrote about it: https://www.refsmmat.com/articles/smoking-statistics.html

I don't remember the attribution, but one of my favorite quotes goes something like: "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." I think I first remember seeing it in the foreword of a chapter in the book "Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk" by Peter Bernstein

It seems that no-one knows exactly where it's from. Was in use in the 1890s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...

Love the Huff read. +1 to that.

I'm fairly certain that most of my opening salvos in evaluating the quality of someone's charts come to me from people regurgitating Huff's book.

I'd put it in a class with Fred Brooks; dead obvious, but somehow needing to be constantly re-explained to a new group of people (or the same people at a later date).

>dead obvious, but somehow needing to be constantly re-explained

Because it's not all 'dead obvious', maybe?

"Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained." ~ Pardot Kynes, Dune

There's a great book about this, Everything is Obvious (Once You Know The Answer) about how many scientific studies come up with obvious-seeming findings, but if they'd found the opposite, that would have seemed obvious to us too..

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