Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics
- 9h 19m 59s
- Gary Smith
- Gildan Media
- 2016
Did you know that baseball players whose names begin with the letter "D" are more likely to die young? Or that Asian Americans are most susceptible to heart attacks on the fourth day of the month? Or that drinking a full pot of coffee every morning will add years to your life, but one cup a day increases the risk of pancreatic cancer? All of these "facts" have been argued with a straight face by credentialed researchers and backed up with reams of data and convincing statistics.
As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically observed, "If you torture data long enough, it will confess." Lying with statistics is a time-honored con. In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing. Today, data is so plentiful that researchers spend precious little time distinguishing between good, meaningful indicators and total rubbish. Not only do others use data to fool us, we fool ourselves.
With the breakout success of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, the once humdrum subject of statistics has never been hotter. Drawing on breakthrough research in behavioral economics by luminaries like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely and taking to task 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.
In this Audiobook
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Chapter 1. Patterns, Patterns, Patterns
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Chapter 2. Garbage In, Gospel Out
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Chapter 3. Apples and Prunes
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Chapter 4. Oops!
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Chapter 5. Graphical Gaffes
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Chapter 6. Common Nonsense
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Chapter 7. Confound It!
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Chapter 8. When You're Hot, You're Not
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Chapter 9. Regression
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Chapter 10. Even Steven
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Chapter 11. The Texas Sharpshooter
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Chapter 12. The Ultimate Procrastination
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Chapter 13. Serious Omissions
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Chapter 14. Flimsy Theories and Rotten Data
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Chapter 15. Don't Confuse Me With Facts
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Chapter 16. Data Without Theory
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Chapter 17. Betting the Bank
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Chapter 18. Theory Without Data
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Chapter 19. When to Be Persuaded and When to Be Skeptical
