Misconception 6: “It’s Easy to Lie with Statistics“
Darrell Huff wrote “How to Lie with Statistics” in Michael Wheeler wrote “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: The Manipulation of Public Opinion in America” in 1976 John Allen Paulos wrote “Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences” in 1988 Joel Best wrote “Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists” in 2001 So it must be pretty easy to lie with statistics since everybody is doing it.
Reality
It’s hard to do statistics right but it’s also a lot of work to do them wrong, too. You have to collect data, crunch the numbers, and cook up your story, or perhaps more correctly, cook up your story, make up the data, and call the press conference. But if you’re going to mislead an audience, it’s much easier to use made up facts, phony anecdotes, and illogical conjectures. So why do so many people, particularly politicians, even bother lying with statistics? It’s because numbers provide credibility. If you have little credibility yourself, using numbers can confer the illusion of expertise. And that is why people use statistics in the first place.