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Statistics, when used in a misleading fashion, can trick the casual observer into believing something other than what the data shows. That is, a misuse of statistics occurs when a statistical argument asserts a falsehood. In some cases, the misuse may be accidental. In others, it is purposeful and for the gain of the perpetrator.
Mark Twain popularized the saying in Chapters from My Autobiography, published in the North American Review in 1907. "Figures often beguile me," Twain wrote, "particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'" [4] [1] [2]
How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them) is a 2021 British book by Tom and David Chivers. It describes misleading uses of statistics in the news, with contemporary examples about the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare, politics and crime. The book was conceived by the authors, who are cousins, in early ...
Take one measure of labor market earnings — the pay (including benefits) of the 80% of workers who are not managers or supervisors at work. For decades before 1980, these workers’ hourly pay ...
Simpson's paradox is a phenomenon in probability and statistics in which a trend appears in several groups of data but disappears or reverses when the groups are combined. This result is often encountered in social-science and medical-science statistics, [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] and is particularly problematic when frequency data are unduly given ...
The Will Rogers phenomenon, also rarely called the Okie paradox, [1] is when moving an observation from one group to another increases the average of both groups. It is named after a joke attributed to the comedian Will Rogers about Dust Bowl migration during the Great Depression: [2]
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The book is a brief, breezy illustrated volume outlining the misuse of statistics and errors in the interpretation of statistics, and how errors create incorrect conclusions. In the 1960s and 1970s, it became a standard textbook introduction to the subject of statistics for many college students.