6/5/2023 0 Comments The data detective bookIn The Data Detective, Harford lays out ten rules that help separate facts from fiction. “I grew increasingly uneasy when fans of More or Less complimented the way we ‘debunked false statistics slowly…came to appreciate that the real joy was not in shooting down falsehoods but in trying to understand what was true” (11). His ambitious goal with his recent book, The Data Detective, is to create an alternative to Huff’s skepticism: to provide his readers with a set of common sense principles that will allow them to sift statistical truth from lies. Economist Tim Harford used to think that Huff had the right idea, but in the years since he began hosting the BBC program More or Less in 2007, he has become increasingly uncomfortable with Huff’s view. Readers tend to leave the book feeling quite cynical about statistics. 60 years later, Huff’s persuasive demonstration of the power of statistics, when used to back misinformation with seemingly solid data, remains popular. “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Have you heard that before? Said it before? The quote is often wrongly attributed to Mark Twain and has been popularized in many places, including a little book called How To Lie With Statistics, written by Darryl Huff in the 1950s.
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