How To Lie With Statistics Ep. 1

Posted by Stephanie Dyson in Statistics - Miles - B on

This is podcast 1 of a 3-podcast series that dissects the novel, "How To Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff. The book itself explores the various ways that statistics are altered and used outright incorrectly to project a certain image, convey a certain feeling, or produce a certain outcome within the masses. 
In this series, Stephanie Dyson, Dillon Hershey, Maggie Clampet-Lundquist and Sean Morris look into the various themes that comprise the book and dissect what this means, not only for their high school stats class, but for the world around them. 

In this first podcast:
The group explores the overarching themes, the author's writing style, the helpfulness of the illustrations and the specific ideas within the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2. We look at various questions that often take a more psychological turn. We questioned why people lie in statistical situations, looking at how stats turns people into numbers and tries to make sense of things on a macro-scale. We also did some personal reflection on how statistics makes us question nearly everything that we hear for the better(and had some fun towards the end trying to personify the subject itself).

Enjoy and stay tuned with the squad as we continue to go forth with our inquiry on the novel! 

Music is provided for free by Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment's debut album, "Surf", which dropped May 2015.

Comments (1)

Mark Miles (Teacher)
Mark Miles

Good first podcast. Very nice! Would be nice if you posted the mp3 instead of a link to soundcloud (because soundcloud doesn't work in school).

For next time, make sure you respond to the following prompts:

  1. Choose one of the quotations inside the front cover and discuss how it relates to the Introduction.
  2. What is the advantage of a stratified random sample and what difficulties does it pose, according to this chapter?
  3. When we see an average reported, what do we need to ask besides which kind of average is being used? Why?

Finally, when discussing chapters 3, 5, or 6, incorporate the following article into your discussion:

http://gizmodo.com/how-to-lie-with-data-visualization-1563576606

Also, each member of your group should find an article online containing a misleading graph and discuss it during the podcast (be sure to talk about why it’s misleading!). Be sure to include a link to all articles in the text of your post of the podcast that corresponds to chapters 3, 5, or 6.