"if you can' prove what you want to provedemonstrate something else and pretend they are the same thing in the daze that follows the collision of statistics with the human mindhardly anyone will notice the difference " statistical thinking is relatively new invention for most of recorded history things were assessed qualitatively rather than quantitatively people must have had an intuitive sense of some statistical facts ( that women are usually shorter than men)but they had no mathematical tools that would allow them to proceed from anecdotal evidence to statistical conclusions this started to change in the middle of the th centurymost notably with the publication of john graunt' natural and political observations made upon the bills of mortality this pioneering work used statistical analysis to estimate the population of london from death rollsand attempted to provide model that could be used to predict the spread of plague since that time people have used statistics as much to mislead as to inform some have willfully used statistics to misleadothers have merely been incompetent in this we discuss few ways in which people can be fooled into drawing inappropriate inferences from statistical data we trust that you will use this information only for goodi to become better consumer and more honest purveyor of statistical information garbage in garbage out (gigo"on two occasions have been asked [by members of parliament]'praymr babbageif you put into the machine wrong figureswill the right answers come out? am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such question charles babbage the message here is simple one if the input data is seriously flawedno amount of statistical massaging will produce meaningful result the united states census showed that insanity among free blacks and mulattoes was roughly ten times more common than among enslaved blacks and mulattoes the conclusion was obvious as senator (and former vice president and future secretary of statejohn calhoun put it"the data on insanity revealed in this census is unimpeachable from it our nation must conclude that the abolition of slavery would be to the african curse never mind that it was soon clear that the census was riddled with errors as calhoun reportedly explained to john quincy adams"there were so many errors they darrell huffhow to lie with statistics