Download Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics AudioBook Free
Did you know that baseball players whose titles begin with the letter "D" will perish young? Or that Asian People in america are most susceptible to heart episodes on the fourth day of the month? Or that ingesting a full container of coffee each morning will add years to your life, but one glass a day increases the risk of pancreatic cancer? Many of these "facts" have been argued with a right face by credentialed research workers and backed up with reams of data and convincing statistics. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically seen, "In the event that you torture data long enough, it'll confess." Lying down with statistics is a time-honored con. In Standard Deviations, economics teacher Gary Smith strolls us through the various stunts and traps that people use to support their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unacquainted with the mischief these are committing. Today, data is so abundant that research workers spend precious little time distinguishing between good, significant signals and total rubbish. Not only do others use data to fool us, we fool ourselves. Using the breakout success of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, the once humdrum subject matter of statistics has never been hotter. Drawing on discovery research in behavioral economics by luminaries like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely and taking to process some of the conclusions of Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt, Standard Deviations demystifies the science behind statistics and makes it easy to spot the fraud all around.
