The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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Darrell Huff, �How to Lie With Statistics�

Started February 28 � Finished March 1, 2003; 142 pages. Posted 11 March 2003

Math is the bane of my existence. Fortunately, I haven�t had to deal with much, as I was thrown out of school at the beginning of my sophomore year in high school.

Not that it mattered, as far as I remember � I�ve always hated math. My first bad math experience came when I must have been seven years� old. My parents, in their infinite hippie wisdom, decided that my sister and I could stay up an hour later than our designate bedtime in order to watch, for the first time we could remember, a show that wasn�t on our local PBS station. In fact, what we would be allowed to watch would be the Beatles cartoon, The Yellow Submarine.

We were excited about this, but there was a catch: we both had to work on our multiplication tables. My sister (Otherwise known as my pink sister, as previously noted) went to work. I blew it off, mostly because I couldn�t stand math. That night I was sent to bed after the first half-hour, while my sister got to see the movie in its entirety.

Now more than two decades later, my sister works at Intel and previously worked at a bank. I work at a bookstore. She also loves the Beatles, and I couldn�t care less about them. I still say I got the better deal. Sure, she makes more money than I do, but I can�t be sure about that as I can�t do the math.

Eventually I went back to academia, despite being told by my high school advisors that I would never succeed in a scholastic environment. Since I always read voraciously, even after being thrown out of the school system, taking on courses like writing, critical thinking, and even history proved to be simple. But I always kept a worried eye on the requirements for graduation, knowing that eventually, I would have to take a math class.

Then the bomb dropped. The university system changed its requirements, stating that every student needed to take statistics in order to graduate. I had barely taken pre-algebra before I was forcibly removed. I was fucked. Still, I put it off as long as possible.

Finally I reached a point where all I had left that I could possibly take were courses in areas that I had no idea about � science and mathematics. I had to take both, slowly going through pre-algebra, then algebra, and then finally, statistics.

I failed statistics.

I took it again, but dropped after realizing I was doomed to fail it again. Math instructors always involved professors that took way too much time thinking about math, and what was second nature to them was completely out of left field for me. They would run through the exercises, explaining how to do the mechanics, and inevitably, my hand would shoot up.

�Why would you do that?� I�d ask.

�Because that�s how you solve the problem,� they would answer.

�I know that�s how you would solve the problem, but why would you do it like that?�

�I�m afraid I don�t understand the problem.�

�Well, that makes two of us.�

I finally passed the course on the third try, probably more because I had saved all my previous attempts in homework than due to any understanding of the concepts. I even managed to get a B in the course. I had saved A LOT of homework from previous attempts. Anyway, I ripped out and set fire to every single page of that book one page, at a time when it was finished.

Around the same time, I was dating a girl who was a total freak. I can prove this. First, as I already noted, she was dating me. Second, she read even more than I did. Third, she liked math. So as a birthday present, she gave me with this book.

Gee, thanks.

So you can see why this took me a while to get to. And lucky for me, it�s not really dealing with the mechanics behind statistics, instead just pointing out critical thinking skills when looking at surveys, dealing with exaggeration, smaller sample sizes, and faulty comparisons. It was also written in 1954, when the world was a much simpler place.

Still though, whenever it started to delve a little too deep into number theory, my head would start to hurt and my arm wanted to shoot up to ask why anybody would want to do that. But now I�m done, my headache has subsided, and I can never think about math again.

Once I finish this fucking tax return, that is.


Rating: Flea Market Material.

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