Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Truths

Dubbahdee sends along an article by a design company showing how graphic presentation can make different impressions - all of them true - arise from the data. They disguise their own slant - if they have one - admirably well, though if I had to guess I would think they lean left.

The examples given by Darrell Huff in How To Lie With Statistics are more linear.  This example is a little subtler, not only relying on our immediate visual impression, but on our quiet assumptions as well.  I will repeat, BTW, that the Huff 1954 book, though all the dollar values should likely be increased by a factor of ten now, should be required reading in highschool.  When folks take it into their head to design a canon to suggest for secondary education, that title is nearly never on the list, but immediately assented to once someone suggests it in the comments.  List-makers tend to favor books which teach Great Ideas.  Seeing through Bad Ideas may be more to the point.

2 comments:

james said...

Amen. And I'd put Parkinson's Law on the list, or at least excerpts from it. (I suggested to a couple of professors that they make their grad students read it and The Mythical Man-Month. They nodded politely.)

Dubbahdee said...

It is now on my amazon wishlist and on Emma's HS reading list. You are correct sir. If a HS student is not provided with a highly sophisticated BS detector, they are in deep doo doo.