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Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Gary Smith (Author), Tim Andres Pabon (Narrator), Gildan Media, LLC (Publisher)
4.2 out of 5 stars 297 ratings

Did you know that baseball players whose names begin with the letter "D" are more likely to die young? Or that Asian Americans are most susceptible to heart attacks on the fourth day of the month? Or that drinking a full pot of coffee every morning will add years to your life, but one cup a day increases the risk of pancreatic cancer? All of these "facts" have been argued with a straight face by credentialed researchers and backed up with reams of data and convincing statistics.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically observed, "If you torture data long enough, it will confess." Lying with statistics is a time-honored con. In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing. Today, data is so plentiful that researchers spend precious little time distinguishing between good, meaningful indicators and total rubbish. Not only do others use data to fool us, we fool ourselves.

With the breakout success of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, the once humdrum subject of statistics has never been hotter. Drawing on breakthrough research in behavioral economics by luminaries like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely and taking to task some of the conclusions of Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt, Standard Deviations demystifies the science behind statistics and makes it easy to spot the fraud all around.

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  1. Listening Length
    9 hours and 20 minutes
  2. Author
    Gary Smith
  3. Narrator
    Tim Andres Pabon
  4. Audible release date
    June 1, 2016
  5. Language
    English
  6. Publisher
    Gildan Media, LLC
  7. ASIN
    B01G61WNTW
  8. Version
    Unabridged
  9. Program Type
    Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length 9 hours and 20 minutes
Author Gary Smith
Narrator Tim Andres Pabon
Whispersync for Voice Ready
Audible.com Release Date June 01, 2016
Publisher Gildan Media, LLC
Program Type Audiobook
Version Unabridged
Language English
ASIN B01G61WNTW
Best Sellers Rank

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
297 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book enlightening, with one noting it provides a delicate balance between educational examples. Moreover, the book is easy to understand and entertaining, featuring genuinely fun anecdotes.

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Enlightened contentReadabilityEase of understandingEntertainment value
12 customers mention "Enlightened content"12 positive0 negative

Customers find the book enlightening, with one mentioning it provides a delicate balance between educational examples and another noting it's particularly valuable for beginners in statistics.

"Very enjoyable and enlightening" Read more

"...This book is full of useful insights." Read more

"A lot of great examples of how data gets used incorrectly. Nothing super advanced, but really valuable for someone starting off in Statistics" Read more

"...This is an entertaining, educational book that reads remarkably fast...." Read more

7 customers mention "Readability"7 positive0 negative

Customers find the book enjoyable to read.

"This is a good book about how one might get fooled by manipulative presentation of data." Read more

"...It is a very enjoyable read - until it isn't, and for me that occurred about ⅔ of the way through...." Read more

"Very enjoyable and enlightening" Read more

"...Truly worth reading and very interesting, I think this book should be read by every modern person and be required reading for all college students." Read more

5 customers mention "Ease of understanding"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book easy to understand, with one mentioning that the concepts are clearly explained and another noting its lively writing style.

"...makes the complex issue of statistical deceptions and mistakes easy to understand through simple language and entertaining examples...." Read more

"...book should be read by every modern person and be required reading for all college students." Read more

"...many people find as exciting as watching paint dry, but Smith's lively writing style and plentiful examples help keep the reader's interest..." Read more

"...Professor Smith's insights are conveyed in an easy to understand manner and his instructions are very valuable to everyone!..." Read more

4 customers mention "Entertainment value"4 positive0 negative

Customers find the book entertaining, with genuinely fun anecdotes.

"...This is an entertaining, educational book that reads remarkably fast...." Read more

"...and mistakes easy to understand through simple language and entertaining examples...." Read more

"Gary Smith's book Standard Deviations is an enjoyable, highly readable overview of using statistical analysis correctly and the pitfalls that can..." Read more

"Both enlightening and entertaining...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Wayne K Austin
    5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to understand
    Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2025
    Verified Purchase
    Don’t be afraid to read this book. It is not written for mathematicians. If you can read a newspaper, you can read and understand the author’s argument. This book is full of useful insights.
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  • Amazon Customer
    4.0 out of 5 stars A lot of great examples of how data gets used incorrectly
    Reviewed in the United States on July 2, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    A lot of great examples of how data gets used incorrectly. Nothing super advanced, but really valuable for someone starting off in Statistics
    5 people found this helpful
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  • parallel
    5.0 out of 5 stars The Book That Deserved A Better Cover
    Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2023
    Verified Purchase
    While I consider myself reasonably intelligent in most areas, I can’t say that’s true of statistics. The formulas and charts and esoteric nuances drive me to wonder if I might be more entertained by sticking a fork in my forehead. Standard Deviations left me feeling smarter about the use and misuse of statistics. Regression to mean actually makes since now. Why coffee, chocolate and other foods are super one week and horrible the next has a rational explanation. The reason that solid data is nothing without a causal link is finally clear.

    The one thing I wish Smith would have done different is run some numbers on how bad cover designs effect book sales. This is an entertaining, educational book that reads remarkably fast. Unfortunately, I almost didn’t buy it because the cover made me recoil from its dry, stodgy, textbooky look. Yeah, I know about not judging a book by its cover but I would bet research shows most readers do. I’m glad I resisted the urge.
    25 people found this helpful
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  • P. Cook
    3.0 out of 5 stars Figures don't lie, but liars figure
    Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2017
    Verified Purchase
    I started to give this book 2 stars, but couldn't honestly say I didn't like it.

    It is a very enjoyable read - until it isn't, and for me that occurred about ⅔ of the way through. At that point the malarkey factor made me ask myself why I was taking time to read i. My answer was that Smith is an engaging writer, and I kept oping that he would explain some of the tings he was point at derisively. Do athletes hat hot streaks? Sure, and the good ones manage to have them occur during Olympic competition.Why spend a number of pages considering whether a person with initials GOD has any predictable charactereristic different that a person with initials PIG. Do we care about Houdini or psychic phenomena?

    There is a lot of good material here, written in an engaging way. The bottom line is to b skeptical of theories that are "proven" by the same data that was used to find them. Point well taken, and very useful.

    But there are somereal problems. The author repeatedly decries any chart that does not show the zero point on the ordinal axis. But if you want to look at a large number, such as CDP, taking the axis down to zero yields a meaningless chart, mostly empty but with a straight line at the top. A meaningful presentation requires that the data curve occupy a sizable amount of the graph.

    There is repeated reference to the independence of individual trials, and a phenomenon he call "Regression to the Mean". He suggests that if students take a test, you might see one do poorly, and another do very well.The he asserts that on a retake of the test the poor studied will have a higher score, and the good one a lower score as both regress toward the mean.

    I suspect the Professor Smith is an engaging teacher. I also suspect that he uses material like this to relieve the stress of discussing degrees of freedom, and the math of a hyperkurtoid normal distribution.

    It is a good read, but leaves the reader with a degree of suspicion about any paper describing empirical results. I had always assumed that these problems were within the purview of editors, and peer reviewers prior to publication, and independent replication of results after publication, but before general acceptance by the relevant community.

    And of course any change in prevailing models is subject to the resistance of a paradigm shift (as described by Thomas Kuhn).

    Caveat lector.
    30 people found this helpful
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  • Peter L. Swinford
    4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Reminder Of How Others Might Manipulate Us
    Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    This is a good book about how one might get fooled by manipulative presentation of data.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Mark B Gerstein
    5.0 out of 5 stars Thoughts on Smith's Standard Deviations: Makes Statistical Blunders Easy to Spot
    Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2020
    Verified Purchase
    I read Gary Smith's book Standard Deviations with great interest. The book makes the complex issue of statistical deceptions and mistakes easy to understand through simple language and entertaining examples. Smith covered statistical cases ranging from the obvious (e.g., misleading graphs) to much more subtle (e.g., mistakes where people see apparent clusters in random data without accounting for various confounding effects). I especially liked the way Smith tackled the subtle examples. He went over the many instances in training models and using them to mine data where the process becomes highly sensitive to various parameters such as binning. He also pointed out mistakes such as not sufficiently testing multiple hypotheses and not correcting for confounders. He described one obvious confounder in detail - how the population is always increasing and how things correlated with it, in turn, seem to be correlated with each other. For instance, one can see an ever-increasing amount of diaper and rug sales, but these are just correlated with overall population growth rather than being correlated with each other. There is also a nice discussion of survivorship bias -- how one does statistics only on those that survive and not the entire original cohort. This was most notably seen in the famous case of the vulnerable parts of World War II planes, determined only from the planes returning from combat. Overall, I found this book very easy to read, and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to avoid statistical blunders.
    18 people found this helpful
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  • DDC
    5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Treatment of a Challenging Topic
    Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2024
    Verified Purchase
    The author provides an interesting discussion of issues leading to misinterpretation of research findings. He also points out common errors in how the public accepts supposed patterns and trends. He points out out the human tendency to look patterns where none exist.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Amazon Customer
    4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    Very enjoyable and enlightening
    2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Gary
    5.0 out of 5 stars good unbiased view of the use of data and statistics
    Reviewed in Australia on February 13, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    The book is well written, although one could say a slight business lean. Approaches the regression to the mean and the many pitfalls of data farming. Would recommend this as an adjunct to any statistics course and epiodemiology.
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  • S. Snipes
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great overview of statistical fallacies
    Reviewed in Italy on December 13, 2015
    Verified Purchase
    This book was great! Despite being about the much dreaded topic of statistics, it was highly entertaining and easy to read. Gary Smith filled his book with understandable examples and winning arguments, truely helping the reader understand how easily data is tortured and sold as fact.
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  • Rohit
    5.0 out of 5 stars Always check Y-axis of a graph
    Reviewed in India on September 11, 2021
    Verified Purchase
    It's a must read book about how data is played and shown to us in graphs.
    A practical book that can help you to make wiser decisions.
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  • Aisaac
    5.0 out of 5 stars Buen libro práctico y útil
    Reviewed in Mexico on December 5, 2019
    Verified Purchase
    Buen libro, practico y útil. Sin duda lo recomiendo
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  • RjC
    5.0 out of 5 stars Facts and do they mean what we are told they mean!
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 14, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    We are bombarded with "facts" almost every day from many and varied sauces. The headline grabs our attention telling us of some new conclusion which will impact on our lives. How we must instantly change or forever be lost.
    This book, with well written examples, suggests how we might want to look at the plethora of information and assess its validity.
    The book is not just for those with an academic or scientific background but for anyone with an enquiring mind. It is written in in an easy almost chatty style that makes you want to learn more.
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