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:
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.)
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.
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