Quotes from Darrell Huff

Now these figures have pretty conclusively demonstrated that people who have gone to college make more money than people who have not. The exceptions are numerous, of course, but the tendency is strong and clear.

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 an 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.

graphs are not always what they seem. There may be more in them than meets the eye, and there may be a good deal less.

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

It appears that the reporter has passed along some words without inquiring what they mean, and you are expected to read them just as uncritically for the happy illusion they give you of having learned something. It is all too reminiscent of an old definition of the lecture method of classroom instruction: a process by which the contents of the textbook of the instructor are transferred to the notebook of the student without passing through the heads of either party.

The deceptive thing about the little figure that is not there is that its absence so often goes unnoticed. That, of course, is the secret of its success.

There is terror in numbers.

a difference is a difference only if it makes a difference.

proper treatment will cure a cold in seven days, but left to itself a cold will hang on for a week.

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.

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

Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way, just as one hundred tossed pennies will rarely come up exactly fifty heads and fifty tails.

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.

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.

Extrapolations are useful, particularly in that form of soothsaying called forecasting trends. But in looking at the figures or charts made from them, it is necessary to remember one thing constantly: The trend-to-now may be a fact, but the future trend represents no more than an educated guess. Implicit in it is "everything else being equal" and "present trends continuing." And somehow everything else refuses to remain equal, else life would be dull indeed.

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with entire confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one thing wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.

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.

The basic sample is the kind called "random." It is selected by pure chance from the "universe," a word by which the statistician means the whole of which the sample is a part.

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.

Permitting statistical treatment and the hypnotic presence of numbers and decimal points to befog causal relationships is little better than superstition.

It is dangerous to mention any subject having high emotional content without hastily saying where you are for or agin it.

What comes full of virtue from the statistician's desk may find itself twisted, exaggerated, oversimplified, and distorted-through-selection by salesman, public-relations expert, journalist, or advertising copywriter.