Ambiguous Praise & Extrapolation
I have no idea why it took me so long to read it when it was available from before my birth, but it's only last week that I picked up and read Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics (New York : W.W.Norton & Company, 1954/1993. 142 pages, illustrated by Irving Geis).
It's a good, informative, and entertaining book although I wasn't wild without reservation. However, I think my worst criticism came from my taste in such things: I could have done with less faffing about and brisker exposition. On the other hand, I don't know of another book with quite the same purpose–and it certainly is a noble and necessary purpose–or quite the same brevity and sense of humor, so I thought it was certainly worth the rather short investment of time it needed. There's more in my book note.
You know that I am fascinated by footnotes. In Huff's 142 pages there is but one, but it's a very entertaining digression on praising–or not–with delightful ambiguity. From pages 100–101:
Author Louis Bromfield is said to have a stock reply to critical correspondents when his mail becomes too heavy for individual attention. Without conceding anything and without encouraging further correspondence, it still satisfies almost everyone. The key sentence: "There may be something in what you say."
It reminds me of the minister who achieved great popularity among mothers in his congregation by his flattering comments on babies brought in for christening. But when the mothers compared notes not one could remember what the man had said, only that it had been "something nice." Turned out his invariable remark was, "My!" (beaming) "This is a baby, isn't it!"
On page 142, the final page of the book, he ends with a quotation that he introduces by saying "…in 1874, Mark Twain summed up the nonsense side of extrapolation in Life on the Mississippi:"
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
One Response
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Saturday, 22 November 2008 at 02.31
Permalink
That Twain excerpt is priceless.
I once had a teacher who would in moments lapse into a W.C. Fields voice, saying theatrically, while looking all around in front of him, "If you were to take all the poorly informed people in this part of town and put them in one place . . . at one time . . ."
And there his voice would trail off, leaving the rest just hang out there. The put down was on us, but we always laughed.