How to Lie with Statistics

Benjamin Disraeli: "There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics"

There are some great statisticians and data manipulators out there, and that can manoeuvre things in a way to get exactly the result they want. Any time you see a statistic, you should consider that it might be a lie.

You need to learn some of these tricks so that you can defend yourself. The author says that the crooks know exactly how to manipulate data and statistics, so the honest people must learn the tricks as a matter of self defense. (Or, if you’re that way inclined and a little sneaky, you can sue some of these tricks to manipulate data of your own and lie with statistics a little more).

In the podcast episode and in this blog post, we’re going to cover:

Sampling Errors Biased Sampling The different types of “averages” How you can use and unrelated number to answer a different question And How you can fight back against these dodgy statisticians

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