Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling numbers from Media, Politicians, and Activist is written by Joel Best.This book is not some other mathematics of statistic but instead it is a reflection on how society reports, views and interprets statistics in short the sociology of statistics. That is, to show how statistics are skewed and how these bad statistics generates and spread through our society. The title of this book takes after, the famous cynical phrase from Mark Twain "Lies, Damned Lies and Statistic” which groups statistics with lies.
Mr. Best’s book concentrates more in social values and a proponent use of statistics, as well how to tell bad statistics from a good one. It also focuses on how some advocates uses statistics are use in propaganda and exposes of how some statistical information are overly exaggerated in the name of cause. Some topics that are covered in this book are how statistic is use in dealing with the social issues like prostitution, homelessness, suicides, anorexia and many more. Including how statistic can be used with good intention and how bad statistics can be easily generated and modified as they are used.
A quick summary of this book topic includes how statistics are used in dealing with social problems. On chapter one “The importance of statistics”, He explains where statistic comes from, how to use them and why they are important. Mr. Best begins his examination of the problem regarding worst social statistic ever. Chapter two “soft facts” discusses the sources of bad statistic and how bad statistic can cause social problems. Mr. Best also explains how “measurement decisions are hidden” and often times that some statistical reports ignores controversies about measurement and even well-established measure can be controversial. Guessing, poor definitions, poor measures, and bad samples are a primary source of bad statistic. On chapter three Mr. Best talks about “mutant statistics”, methods for mangling numbers. He describes the misunderstanding of statistics and its fallacies that occurs during the reporting and interpreting statistics. This misinterpretation leads to what we call “mutant statistics”. Chapter four describes the dangers of inappropriate which we call "apples to oranges" comparisons. One of the most comparisons are when we compare the prices of items in different times. Since money's value changes over time we cannot compare same items from different times. Chapter five talks about the 'stat wars', which happens when advocates competes or uses these unquestionable numbers to make their cause more important to the public.
Mr. Best in his concluding chapter talks about the four mindset of towards statistics. He views many people as awestruck or naive towards statistics. He advises us to be skeptics or view statistics critically and not take statistics on its face value. Damned lies and statistics is an informative introduction to social statistics. If you are new to social statistics this book would be a great read for you. On the other hand, if you are already both knowledgeable and skeptical about statistics, you may find this book to be a slow read and very boring for you. One dangers, of this book is that learning about misleading statistic may lead you to cynicism, and learning about the fallacies may lead to overall rejection of statistics. Mr. Best hopes for the readers to not turn into cynics but instead to be critics.
