andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1285 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Remember How to Lie With Statistics? It turns out that the author worked for the cigarette companies. John Mashey points to this, from Robert Proctor’s book, “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition”: Darrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie With Statistics, was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent Surgeon General’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies.” Huff peppered his attack with with amusing asides and anecdotes, lampooning spurious correlations like that between the size of Dutch families and the number of storks nesting on rooftops–which proves not that storks bring babies but rather that people with large families tend to have larger houses (which therefore attract more storks).
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 It turns out that the author worked for the cigarette companies. [sent-2, score-0.202]
2 On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent Surgeon General’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies. [sent-4, score-0.349]
3 For example, Huff’s activities with the cigarette companies are not mentioned on his Wikipedia page (as of 17 Apr 2012), nor are they mentioned in an article on Huff by probabilist J. [sent-7, score-0.307]
4 It appears that in the late 1960s he was also working on a book called “How to Lie with Smoking Statistics,” which the publisher saw “high likelihood of proceeding into print. [sent-10, score-0.171]
5 ” In November 1965, a letter was sent to Huff as follows: Here ‘s a letter from 1967 where Huff asks the tobacco dudes for another $1500 to keep writing. [sent-11, score-0.26]
6 And here ‘s a letter from mid-1968 from Huff’s publisher, Macmillan: But publication “as soon as possible” never seems to have occurred. [sent-12, score-0.086]
7 In one of these documents, William Kloepfer, vice president for public relations for the Tobacco Institute, wrote of the manuscript, “Frankly, this mass of verbiage needs drastic editing before it will directly address itself to the needs of our industry. [sent-14, score-0.311]
8 ” After glancing at a couple of sections from the draft, I gotta say that William Kloepfer had a point: “mass of verbiage” is a pretty good description! [sent-15, score-0.052]
9 Huff’s book chapter reads like a bad sitcom where the writers were too lazy to put together enough material and they just milk the same couple of jokes over and over again. [sent-16, score-0.101]
10 In retrospect, I think Huff really dodged a bullet on this one. [sent-17, score-0.047]
11 If “How to Lie with Smoking Statistics” had come out, I expect it would’ve destroyed his reputation—remember, we’re talking 1969 here, that’s five years after the Surgeon General’s report—and taken a big bite out of the later sales and reputation of his 1954 bestseller. [sent-18, score-0.091]
12 I wanted to call this post, How to Lie With “How to Lie With Statistics,” but to be fair I have no reason to believe that Huff was lying or intentionally deceiving in his testimony. [sent-21, score-0.13]
13 He may well have simply been misleading himself in analogizing research on the effects of smoking to silly things like studies of storks and babies. [sent-22, score-0.461]
14 And if he was sincere in his views, I can hardly fault him for collecting some money for his efforts. [sent-23, score-0.077]
15 Maybe he intentionally sabotaged it because he sensed it would ruin his reputation, whereas it was possible for him to keep the consulting and testimony under the radar. [sent-26, score-0.179]
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Introduction: Remember How to Lie With Statistics? It turns out that the author worked for the cigarette companies. John Mashey points to this, from Robert Proctor’s book, “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition”: Darrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie With Statistics, was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent Surgeon General’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies.” Huff peppered his attack with with amusing asides and anecdotes, lampooning spurious correlations like that between the size of Dutch families and the number of storks nesting on rooftops–which proves not that storks bring babies but rather that people with large families tend to have larger houses (which therefore attract more storks).
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Introduction: After our discussion of the sad case of Darrell Huff, the celebrated “How to Lie with Statistics” guy who had a lucrative side career disparaging the link between smoking and cancer, I was motivated to follow John Mashey’s recommendation and read the book, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, by historian Robert Proctor. My first stop upon receiving the book was the index, in particular the entry for Rubin, Donald B. I followed the reference to pages 440-442 and found the description of Don’s activities to be accurate, neither diminished nor overstated, to the best of my knowledge. Rubin is the second-most-famous statistician to have been paid by the cigarette industry, but several other big and small names have been on the payroll at one time or another. Here’s a partial list . Just including the people I know or have heard of: Herbert Solomon, Stanford Richard Tweedie, Bond U Arnold Zellner, U of Chicago Paul Switzer, S
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Introduction: Upon reading this , Susan remarked, “Don’t you think it’s interesting that a guy who promotes smoking has a last name of ‘Huff’? Reminds me of the Dennis/Dentist studies.” Good point. P.S. As discussed in the linked thread, the great statistician R. A. Fisher was notorious for minimizing the risks of smoking. How does this connect to Fisher’s name, one might ask?
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Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. We’re all used to distortions and misleading statements in political discourse — the use of these methods one thing on which politicians are fairly nonpartisan. But I think it’s rare to see an outright lie, especially about a really major issue. We had a doozy yesterday, when Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann presented a graphic that attributed the 2009 federal budget to the Obama administration. Oddly, most of the other facts and figures she presented were correct, although some of them seem calculatedly misleading. If you’re going to lie about something really big, why not just lie about everything?
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Introduction: Stephanie Evergreen writes: Media, web design, and marketing have all created an environment where stakeholders – clients, program participants, funders – all expect high quality graphics and reporting that effectively conveys the valuable insights from evaluation work. Some in statistics and mathematics have used data visualization strategies to support more useful reporting of complex ideas. Global growing interest in improving communications has begun to take root in the evaluation field as well. But as anyone who has sat through a day’s worth of a conference or had to endure a dissertation-worthy evaluation report knows, evaluators still have a long way to go. To support the development of researchers and evaluators, some members of the American Evaluation Association are proposing a new TIG (Topical Interest Group) on Data Visualization and Reporting. If you are a member of AEA (or want to be) and you are interested in joining this TIG, contact Stephanie Evergreen.
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Introduction: Adam Marcus at Retraction Watch reports on a physicist at the University of Toronto who had this unfortunate thing happen to him: This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief and first and corresponding author. The article was largely a duplication of a paper that had already appeared in ACS Nano, 4 (2010) 3374–3380, http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/nn100335g. The first and the corresponding authors (Kramer and Sargent) would like to apologize for this administrative error on their part . . . “Administrative error” . . . I love that! Is that what the robber says when he knocks over a liquor store and gets caught? As Marcus points out, the two papers have different titles and a different order of authors, which makes it less plausible that this was an administrative mistake (as could happen, for example, if a secretary was given a list of journals to submit the paper to, and accidentally submitted it to the second journal on the list without realizing it
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