統計陷阱（英文版）.pdfVIP

R6 How to Lie with Statistics Darrell Huff Meredith Mincey Readings 5050 Spring 2010 In Darrell Huffs famous book, he teaches us how to lie with statistics so as to protect ourselves from false information. In Chapter 1, Huff tells us that a “surprisingly precise figure” is most likely false. Anything that is a nice round number or very specific is unlikely to be scientifically accurate. Those who use those precise figures haven’t done an appropriate sample, and they create bad samples in all kinds of ways. If the sample is large enough and selected properly, it will represent the whole better. If the sample is too small and or the creator too biased, the conclusions will be false but appear scientific. Unfortunately, bad samples lie behind most of what you read. Sometimes respondents to questions lie because they want to give a pleasing answer. But most of the time, results are only as good as the samples. Be skeptical. Creators who are serious about taking accurate samples must eliminate any chance of bias. To do this, creators can use a basic sample called “the random sample.” Creators choose random samples by selecting things by chance from the “universe.” The universe is the whole thing in which the sample is a part. For instance, perhaps the universe is UNT undergraduates, and you want to see how many undergraduates plan to enroll in graduate courses. All undergraduates currently at UNT would be the universe, but that’s a very large population to select samples from. It would be expensive to do a random sample large enough to accurately predict how many undergraduates plan to go to graduate school. A more economic substitute to the random sample is the “stratified random sample.” To take a stratified random sample, creators would divide the universe (UNT undergraduates) into several groups in proportion to their k