15 Quotes by Darrell Huff

How results that are not indicative of anything can be produced by pure chance—given a small enough number of cases—is something you can test for yourself at small cost. Just start tossing a penny. How often will it come up heads? Half the time of course. Everyone knows that. Well, let’s check that and see…. I have just tried ten tosses and got heads eight times, which proves that pennies come up heads eighty percent of the time.

Many a statistic is false on its face. It gets by only because the magic of numbers brings about a suspension of common sense.

A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler’s “big lie” it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.

IF YOU can’t prove what you want to prove, demonstrate something else and pretend that they are the same thing. In the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mind, hardly anybody will notice the difference. The semiattached figure is a device guaranteed to stand you in good stead. It always has.

The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify.

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.

Just to clear the air, let’s note first of all that whatever an intelligence test measures it is not quite the same thing as we usually mean by intelligence. It neglects such important things as leadership and creative imagination. It takes no account of social judgement or musical or artistic or other aptitudes, to say nothing of such personality matters as diligence and emotional balance.

It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us in trouble. It’s the things we know that ain’t so. – Artemus Ward.

Many a statistic is false on its face. It gets by only because the magic of numbers bring about a suspension of common sense.