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Tag Archives: Huffington Post

My Rating: ★★★★☆

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: The Pirates of the Powerpoint

Darrell Huff uses a simple, but effective literary device to impress his readers about how much statistics affect their daily lives and their understanding of the world.

He does this by pretending that the book is a sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive, like a manual for swindlers, or better, for pirates. He then pretends to justify the crookedness of the book in the manner of the retired burglar whose published reminiscences amounted to a graduate course in how to pick a lock and muffle a footfall: The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense.

This keeps the book interesting and entertaining, though for anyone even partly trained in statistics, it has very little educational value.

Of course, the title of this book and Huff’s little charade would seem to imply that all such operations are the product of intent to deceive. The intelligent reader would be skeptical — it is the unfortunate truth that it not chicanery much of the time, but incompetence. On the other hand, Huff is pretty clear that the ‘errors’ if that is what they are always seem to come down on the side of the interested party. As long as the errors remain one-sided, he says, it is not easy to attribute them to bungling or accident.

No More Mr. Nice Guy

After being fellow pirates for much of the book, in the concluding chapter Huff finally lets go if his pet charade and faces up to the more serious purpose of the book: explaining how to look a phony statistic in the eye and face it down; and no less important, how to recognize sound and usable data in that wilderness of fraud to which the previous chapters have been largely devoted. He lays down some thumb rules, which in the end comes come down to asking intelligent questions of the stats, especially of the conclusions. Asking such questions require the readers to be aware of the tendency of stats to mislead and to not be dazzled by the numbers.

Huff’s book is primarily an attempt to pull down the high estimation automatically awarded to anybody willing to quote numbers. It is a fun evening read for the expert, who may then roll his eyes and say that there is nothing of real value in the book. But as its popularity attests to, it seems to be an important book for the lay reader, just by serving a reminder that the pirates are still out there — wielding their charts.

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The Zombie Combat Manual By Roger Ma

12 Jun

The Zombie Combat Manual: A Guide to Fighting the Living Dead by Roger Ma

My Rating: ★★★☆☆

If the primary goal of a fictional work is to transport you into its alternate reality, Roger Ma does this astonishingly well, considering his chosen method of transport. Ma uses a survival/combat manual to paint the picture of a world not only overrun but perennially and hopelessly infested by the scourge. It is a world where the people have got used to this reality and is adapting to and surviving in pockets of ‘secured areas’. The short combat reports which pepper the manual is effectively used to enhance the pathos of this devastated world, giving a human element to the otherwise monochrome delivery style. The manual is Ma’s way of describing the true horrors of this world where the most outlandish methods and survival techniques are now part of a standard manual issued by the government for the perusal of all its citizens.

Even though written in a language meant to reproduce the dry tone of a technical manual, the book is still strangely compelling and can, quite surprisingly, be even called a page-turner, in spite of being so repetitive page after page in its admonitions and entreaties.

As for the techniques and the numerous advises given, I thing this cartoon would do a better job of readying you for a zombie outbreak than the entire book: