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A Field Guide to Lies

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is akin to calling bullshit, where it goes through all the ways people fool themselves and others. The book might make you too aware and skeptical of everything.

🎨 Impressions

I found it good but not as good as Calling Bullshit. It was thought but lacked the examples that made Calling Bullshit such a good read.

How I Discovered It​

Calling bullshit recommended it as well as I had read a book by the author before.

Who Should Read It?​

Not sure. Depends on how interested you are in data.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I feel like am becoming more and more of a cynic. In the mold of Camus, i try to reject this sarcastic and post-modern view of things and become a more positive person. So what if the world is filled with bullshit, lies, and half-truths. It is still worth trying to belive more and still worth being positive about things.

✍️ My Top Quotes

  • It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. —MARK TWAIN

  • Statistics, because they are numbers, appear to us to be cold, hard facts.

  • Researchers and journalists are not always scrupulous about making this distinction between percentage point and percentages clear, but you should be.

  • There are three ways of calculating an average, and they often yield different numbers, so people with statistical acumen usually avoid the word average in favor of the more precise terms mean, median, and mode.

  • Another thing to watch out for in averages is the bimodal distribution. Remember, the mode is the value that occurs most often. In many biological, physical, and social datasets, the distribution has two or more peaks—that is, two or more values that appear more than the others.

  • Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this). This is a logical fallacy that arises from thinking that just because two things co-occur, one must have caused the other.

  • Calculating proportions rather than actual numbers often helps to provide the true frame.

  • Access is one of those words that should raise red flags when you encounter them in statistics.

  • One way to lie with statistics is to compare things—datasets, populations, types of products—that are different from one another, and pretend that they’re not. As the old idiom says, you can’t compare apples with oranges.

  • As Galileo Galilei said, the job of the scientist is to measure what is measurable and to render measurable that which is not. That is, some of the most creative acts in science involve figuring out how to measure something that makes a difference, that no one had figured out how to measure before.

  • Stratified random sampling is better than non-stratified.

  • Note that for very large populations—like that of the United States—we only need to sample a very small percentage, in this case, less than .0005 percent. But for smaller populations—like that of a corporation or school—we require a much larger percentage. For a company with 10,000 employees, we’d need to sample 964 (almost 10 percent) to obtain the 3 percent margin with 95 percent confidence, and for a company of 1,000 employees, we’d need to sample nearly 600 (60 percent).

  • An infamous error was made in the 1936 U.S. presidential election. The Literary Digest conducted a poll and concluded that Republican Alf Landon would win over the incumbent Democrat, President Roosevelt. The Digest had polled people who were magazine readers, car owners, or telephone customers, not a random sample. The conventional explanation, cited in many scholarly and popular publications, is that in 1936, this skewed heavily toward the wealthy, who were more likely to vote Republican. In fact, according to a poll conducted by George Gallup in 1937, this conventional explanation is wrong—car and telephone owners were more likely to back Roosevelt. The bias occurred in that Roosevelt backers were far less likely to participate in the poll. This sampling bias was recognized by Gallup, who conducted his own poll using a random sample, and correctly predicted the outcome. The Gallup poll was born.

  • Study about political attitudes will skew toward those who are willing to discuss them.

  • Take Gleason grading of tumors—it is only relatively standardized, meaning that you can get different Gleason scores, and hence cancer stage labels, from different pathologists. (In Gleason scoring, a sample of prostate tissue is examined under a microscope and assigned a score from 2 to 10 to indicate how likely it is that a tumor will spread.

  • Physicists at CERN reported that they had measured neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, a finding that would have been among the most important of the last hundred years.

  • Physicists at CERN reported that they had measured neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, a finding that would have been among the most important of the last hundred years. They reported later that they had made an error in measurement.

  • GIGO is a famous saying coined by early computer scientists: garbage in, garbage out. At the time, people would blindly put their trust into anything a computer output indicated because the output had the illusion of precision and certainty.

  • Much of what we read should raise our suspicions. Ask yourself: Is it possible that someone can know this? A newspaper reports the proportion of suicides committed by gay and lesbian teenagers.

  • Lots of people bought Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Indeed, it’s said to be the most purchased and least finished book of the last thirty years.

  • Subjective probability is the only kind of probability that we have at our disposal in practical situations in which there is no experiment, no symmetry equation.

  • A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies. —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  • Even the smartest of us can be fooled. Steve Jobs delayed treatment for his pancreatic cancer while he followed the advice (given in books and websites) that a change in diet could provide a cure. By the time he realized the diet wasn’t working, the cancer had progressed too far to be treated.

  • Politicians have been lying at least since Quintus Cicero advised his brother Marcus to do so in 64 B.C.E.

  • Physics researchers at CERN reported that they had discovered neutrinos traveling faster than light. That would have upended a century of Einsteinian theory. It turns out it was just a loose cable in the linear accelerator that caused a measurement error.

  • The so-called Mozart effect was discredited because the experiments, showing that listening to Mozart for twenty minutes a day temporarily increased IQ, lacked a control group.

  • Malcolm Gladwell spread an invalid conclusion in his book David and Goliath by suggesting that people with dyslexia might actually have an advantage in life, leading many parents to believe that their dyslexic children should not receive the educational remedies they need. Gladwell fell for the missing control condition. We don’t know how much more successful his chosen dyslexics might have been if they had been able to improve their condition.

  • Nature permits us to calculate only probabilities. Yet science has not collapsed. —RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

  • The lie that terrorists want you to believe is that you are in immediate and great peril.

  • Post hoc, ergo propter hoc (loosely translated, it means “because this happened after that, that must have caused this”).

  • Although there was no evidence that thimerosal was linked to autism, it was removed from vaccines in 1992 in Denmark and Sweden, and in the United States starting in 1999, as a “precautionary measure.” Autism rates have continued to increase apace even with the agent removed.

  • Scientists called atoms, from the Greek word atomos, for “indivisible.”

  • Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc (with this, therefore because of this). A logical fallacy that arises from thinking that just because two things co-occur, one must have caused the other. Correlation does not imply causation.