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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

I like that he references Huff's "How to lie with statistics" in the first sentence of the intro. That was the book that came to mind when I saw the subject. Also reminds me of the Twain quote, "There are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics."

But despite this, statistics done well are very powerful.

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With respect to that Twain/Disraeli quote, my friend who is a professor of statistics tells me that he cannot go to a party and say what he does for a living without someone repeating it smirkingly.

Isn't that why the name "Data Science" was invented?

Data science sure sounds sexier...ish.

The irony of people who use the "damned lies and statistics" quote snidely is that the "statistics" part is not referring to the field Statistics but the plural version of the noun statistics, which of course are easily abused. The field of Statistics is all about NOT abusing statistics.

Exactly. If you're doing statistics for yourself, it's good to know the tricks so that you don't fool yourself by mistake. Many times people use statistics to support their positions, rather than to make up their minds. If done right, data science or statistics is about the latter.

...ish.

Yeah, it always makes me wonder when they have to put the "science" in the name. "Computation" seems so much more timeless and elegant than "computer science", for instance. It's almost like "Democratic Republic" for nations.

You know, lotsfields are named that way. Its just that the some of them are less obvious because both the part of the name identifying the domain and the part saying its the science (or "study", but with the same intended meaning) are in Latin, instead of plain English.

It gets worse with Political Science, or perhaps the broader Social Sciences.

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