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Concept
Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Summary
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a phrase describing the persuasive power of statistics to bolster weak arguments, "one of the best, and best-known" critiques of applied statistics. It is also sometimes colloquially used to doubt statistics used to prove an opponent's point.
The phrase was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. However, the phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were years after his death. Several other people have been listed as originators of the quote, and it is often attributed to Twain himself.
Mark Twain popularized the saying in Chapters from My Autobiography, published in the North American Review in 1907. "Figures often beguile me," Twain wrote, "particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'"
Colin White traces the origins to François Magendie (1783-1855). While arguing against using blood-letting to treat fever, and confronted with statistical numbers he believed to be manufactured, this French physiologist stated: "Thus the alteration of the truth which is already manifesting itself in the progressive form of lying and perjury, offers us, in the superlative, the statistics." In White's opinion, the world had a need of this phrase, many people "would have been proud" to coin it, and the origins are now obscured, as the phrase passed "from wit to wit".
Alternative attributions include, among many others (for example Walter Bagehot and Arthur James Balfour), the radical English journalist and politician Henry Du Pré Labouchère (1831–1912), Jervoise Athelstane Baines, and British politician and scholar Leonard H. Courtney, who used the phrase in 1895 and two years later became president of the Royal Statistical Society.
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