How to lie with Statistics: Interactive
The white collar criminal’s handbook
Would it surprise anyone that Bill Gates was caught with a copy (on multiple occasions?)
I’m going to summarize some key points of the book.
We’ll cover 3 tricks, 1 joke, then play the choose your own adventure game. Without further ado…
The Gee-whiz Graph
This “is a subtler equivalent of editing ‘National income rose ten percent’ into ‘…climbed a whopping ten percent.’ It is vastly more effective, however, because it contains no adjectives or adverbs to spoil the illusion of objectivity.”
The Well-chosen Average
“My trick was to use a different kind of average each time, the word “average” having a very loose meaning. It is a trick commonly used, sometimes in innocence but often in guilt, by fellows wishing to influence public opinion or sell advertising space. When you are told that something is the average you still don’t know very much about it unless you can find out which of the common kinds of average it is- mean, median, or mode.”
The Semiattached Figure
“If you can’t prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing”
Joke(hahaha):
“A roadside merchant was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have to put in some horse meat too. But I mix ’em fifty-fifty: one horse, one rabbit.’”
Choose your own adventure game:
Since last year…
cost of bread has doubled(5 cents to 10 cents,)
and cost of milk has been cut in half(20 cents to 10 cents.)
From these two statistics we can deduce the overall change in cost of living.
Would you rather convince the viewer that cost of living has increased or decreased?
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Increased:
As you can see the overall cost of living has increased this year from 100% to 125%. We get this by taking the mean of bread (which is at 200% of what it was) and milk (which is at 50% of what it was.) The mean of these two percentages is 125% which indicates a 25% total increase in cost of living over the past year.
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Decreased:
As you can see the overall cost of living has decreased this year by 25%. We get this by taking the mean of last year’s bread (which was 200% of what it is today) and milk (which was 50% of what it is today.) The mean of these two percentages for last year is125% which indicates a 25% total decrease in cost of living over the past year.
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In conclusion, we’re really left with more questions than answers. Who is this man, and why was he reading this sketchy book?
