How To Lie With Statistics

Posted by Amanda Thieu in Statistics - Miles - C on

  • Group members present during the discussion: Amanda, Adowa, Sattera, Nashay 
  • What your club discussed: Whether the methods in the book manipulate people 
  • How you discussed it: We brought up different examples and what we found deceving. 
  • Any points of conflict/disagreement in discussion: The main conflict is that we all feel like there are certain samples that are not considered as sufficient samples to derive a conclusion from. 
  • Questions that came up as a result of the discussion: How did you guys feel about the book so far? etc. 

Comments (1)

Mark Miles (Teacher)
Mark Miles

Good first podcast, but the background noise was a bit distracting. I would really like to hear Adowa and Nashay more.

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. List as many sources of sample bias as you can that are mentioned in Chapter 1 and provide an example of each.
  3. Put the second paragraph on Page 18 (“A river cannot….”) into your own words.
  4. What is the advantage of a stratified random sample and what difficulties does it pose, according to this chapter?

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.