Amazing that after 70 years a lot of these practices are still in use and people fall for them. My favorite example are bar charts with truncated axis that are made to show extraordinary growth. But, as is well known, data doesn't matter as much as how you present it (or how much you hide)
vavooom 5 hours ago [-]
One of my favorite things published of all time! Helped convince me to become a Statistics major when going into college.
This is probably the best book on statistics you can give to a student of statistics.
I was under the impression that it is now out of print.
xnx 4 hours ago [-]
Lying with statistics is a subset of the practice of lying with numbers. My [least] favorite trick to lie with numbers is to provide numbers without any context (e.g. "this datacenter uses 1 million gallons of water per year").
gobdovan 20 minutes ago [-]
Wouldn't necessarily call it a lie. More like implicature or maybe "Gricean expectation engineering".
A bit ironic, your comment could be viewed as using a similar technique. Given the ongoing controversy around water consumption in datacenters, choosing this particular example implicitly associates people raising concerns about datacenter water use with deceptive rhetorical practices, without actually making that argument explicitly or presenting a concrete context in which the supposed rhetorical device was used.
Of course, that's not necessarily your intention, only a point about implicatures.
SirFatty 5 hours ago [-]
This book is still in print, why are you sharing a pdf copy?
jruohonen 5 hours ago [-]
Corrected, thanks, though a 1954 copy, but a lot of copies online. A good one, nevertheless (i.e., something you might actually pay for a paper copy).
tourmalinetaco 5 hours ago [-]
Why not? Darrell Huff died in 2001, and under any respectable copyright system his work would have ended up in the public domain in 1979, or at least with his death.
pearl_panel5 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rendered at 00:48:46 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I was under the impression that it is now out of print.
A bit ironic, your comment could be viewed as using a similar technique. Given the ongoing controversy around water consumption in datacenters, choosing this particular example implicitly associates people raising concerns about datacenter water use with deceptive rhetorical practices, without actually making that argument explicitly or presenting a concrete context in which the supposed rhetorical device was used.
Of course, that's not necessarily your intention, only a point about implicatures.