As frustrating as it sometimes is, it’s impossible to be sure how an article will be received or how widely it’ll be read. Sure, you can edit and elucidate and express yourself as eloquently as possible, but in the end, you have to accept that you only have so much control over how many people see your work. Still, now and then, you make a point you really wish more people could hear.
It's buffering. You send the text to type to a cerebral buffer to type it while your foremind continues to compose new material. The buffer does aural language processing and chooses a homophonic substitution.
My buffering goes into high gear when I speak to an audience, I can compose later material while apparently focusing on the nuances of delivery. I never stutter when public-speaking but the defect that made me a (largely healed) stutterer allows me to run two verbal tracks at once.
You know what Mark Twain said about statistics....I have never understood the obsessions with per centages in any situation....nor obsessions with color our race or any of that....having said that, to pretend that all is well in America's urban core, or that it's much ado about nothing or that it is the same everywhere is crazy.
I live in Detroit. I am white, although my father's father was off the boat from the deepest reaches of southern Italy and considered black by the Irish louts who ruled his neighborhood and terrorized his family. He became white through (Jesuit) (admission based on merit) schooling, which led to a PhD. My wife is black, black as can be. Born and raised in the bush in Kenya. Here are some observations, from both of us. I am well aware that correlation doesn't equal causation, that all of my stories are "anecdotal" (and thus generally perceived as having less value than "scientific" analysis)....I get it...
But still:
1. In my little corner of there world, in Detroit, which is 80=% black, as defined by the people themselves, the physical handling of firearms is so casual, so unsafe, so absolutely disconnected from the reality of what happens when that trigger is pulled or weapon dropped....it is mind blowing. There is an apparent close-to-total disconnect from the often-permanent consequences of what happens when a weapon is discharged that, to this day, after many years here, I can not wrap my head around. I'm not a squeamish liberal who shudders at the sight of a firearm. Every house had a gun where I grew up, and 4 years in the USMC infantry exposed me to a bunch more.
2. Related to point No.1 above, but distinct: the casualness with which disputes of ANY kind are settled with firearms as a FIRST resort is mind-boggling. When my neighbor called in her brother to assassinate her "man", casually, and her "man" (who wasn't even hit in the fusillade of gunfire) barely reacted to the gun battle (he was back with her 3-4 days later).....I could fill up Substack with moire non-scientific anecdotes like this... but
3. There is violence everywhere, but in the Detroit urban core (and seemingly in other cities) there is something----something--- going on that leads to off the charts rates of violence among African-Americans, more often men, but startlingly quite frequently women as well. The statistics, accurate or informative or not, on "black-on-black" violence are actually distorted by the "black" word....it is most definitively not "black" males...it is black-males-born-in-central/northern-American-cities who are both causing and being affected by the gun violence. The crime rate among African immigrants here is so negligible as to be unmeasurable....
4. My wife was recently called a "b**** wh***" by one of her students, a 6 year old boy. There are no consequences for that behavior, none, not even temporary suspension. When the mother of one of her students bursts into her classroom and says "I'm gonna f*** this b**** up", before she has even introduced herself, there are no consequences. When a 8-10 year old boy has reached into my work truck and stolen my phone and bought sneakers for his family and pizza for his boys using my CashApp, and is standing on the porch with a big smile while I'm trying to deal with his mother, and he is up on FB waving wads of $100 bills and cell phones, and there are NO consequences, none, it isn't a stretch to hazard a very educated guess that these kids are monsters in the making, and the mother in question is modeling behavior that makes it extremely likely that her children will be part of one set of grim statistics or an other.
5. So why is this? Is it the "hip-hop" culture? Too many video games? Really poor role modeling? A total breakdown of respect for anything? A lack of discipline at a really young age which leads to increasingly dysfunctional behavior? I don't know, but what I do know is that there is something unique in what I have seen here in terms of the casualness of gun violence. I have heard about, but not been exposed to the seemingly indiscriminate violence swirling around some of the Latin gangs, but that isn't part of my experience so I'll let others lead the way.
Great article, btw, and thought-provoking....as always.
I grew up in Saint Louis (left in 67 to enlist in the Marines) and went to an integrated vocational high school before they were generally integrated. As a white guy I was narrowly a minority. A large number came from the projects. It was a violent place. Before the age of guns, it was knives. Multiple stabbings and slashings every year. My locker was across the hall from the nurse's office in my freshman year and several times I couldn't go to it to swap book because there was a cop and a victim there.
An interesting observation was that the stabbings, slashings and one broken bottle to the face was black on black. One could conjure reasons. They were mostly in proximity to each other, people hung with their own. When a guy got stabbed rolling bones in the boy's room, you didn't see white guys gambling with black guys, so they weren't there to get stabbed. I whizzed and left quickly when that was going on.
Even back then I didn't see race as causal as much as environmental things were. People adapt to their environment and the projects were a bad environment to grow up in. Toxic culture spreads like cancer. I tend to view it as a cancer affecting (black in this case) people in the environment rather than the environment being what it is due to the racial makeup of that environment. What initiated that toxin is a whole subject where arguments tend to be more tribal than logic based.
I was raised in Texas and we moved to detroit in the sixties. We only stayed a couple of years. I was in the third grade and was constantly being beat up on by the black kids. They would gang up on me and push me to the ground, then they would all take turns hitting and kicking me. Soon I was sent to the school counselors office. The counselor asked me way those kids wanted to beat me up. My answer, “cause I’m from Texas.”
Now I know is was probably because I was a little red headed, blue eyed girl from Texas. They was just mad. And many are still mad today because they are never allowed to forget and move on like many many before them had to do.
No doubt. I'm 69. It's been ugly for a long time. But the new fashionable ugly where every white is racist is little better than every black is a criminal. This is why research that is honest and nuanced is critical. Your posts are some of the first expressions of courage and reason I have found on these issues anywhere other than McWhorter and Lourie. You however personalize it more without Lourie's conservative tilt on most everything. Thank you for the forum.
Good points. So looking at those qualifiers how do things shake out looking at young Asians in America, young whites in America at cetera? Does that change things substantially?
Yes, to control for race you make everything else ceteris paribus. So young male US Asians, Hispanics, Whites of common income and education compared with each other and with their Black counterparts. That's true apples to apples. Has anyone run the numbers this way? Seems pretty simple to do.
Read the criticism of "The Bell Curve" and you will see that it is not as simple as we would like it to be. The authors of that book did that but made the results of their study seem more significant than it was.
Not hard, considering most people have no grasp of statistics. And it's not easy to teach, introductory statistics is part of the undergraduate college curriculum.
What are your specific criticisms? I'll reread their analysis instead of just dismissing it as racist. Do you see this as a racist effort aside from your criticisms?
Charles Murray has been willing to debate, a standard Steve raised for taking someone seriously. I don't think it a matter of racism as some accuse. The book seemed compelling to me upon reading it and I like to think I hold racism in check. If you are my age you lived thru a hell of a lot of racist assumptions that leave callous in the face of honest effort to overcome it.
I never got in more trouble as a child than when I mentioned race. And though I've gone through a few periods of brief and mild bigotry I always overcame them, and several times I've had black friends and coworkers who told me in very direct terms that I was truly a decent person, that I didn't treat them poorly, nor overcompensate.
The one case I still have some trouble with is Indians. Dot, not feather. There are a lot of H1-Bs in software and a lot of the are really obnoxious and have a terrible work ethic, but that's culture. And before Microsoft added American Hygiene Expectations to new employee orientation in India, a lot of them thought showering more than weekly would make their skin come off, and the BO was enough to make your eyes water.
In 2020 I had an Indian coworker who was probably the worst in every way; he had no pride in his work, did the least he could get away with, did lousy work, and boasted about clearing tasks, however shabbily, was uncommunicative to the point that I had to escalate to management, something I really dislike doing. I struggled to see him as "a lousy coworker" and not as "an Indian." In the end, I wrote up the experience on Medium and made almost $3000 on that one article, buying a nice Moog with the money. I never mentioned his nationality but I didn't have to, so, of course, I got a few jabs of "racist" but for every one of those I had a dozen for whom the article was resonant af.
I did a great deal of international travel, mostly working with people, rather than as a tourist which makes quite a difference in how you get to know people. I never got sent to India, I was not the only traveler in the org. My "strong" people experience was elsewhere but I have developed an ability to tolerate horrible smells.
I worked with what were first wave H1-B workers in my industry and had a manager who led the way in hiring where most managers were a bit more reluctant. Her difficulty, which became mine as a mentor, was that she was able to hire software types, but we were hardware test and you had to understand electronic hardware to write software that did the job. It's a narrow niche field.
At the risk of sounding sexist, I found the women to be harder, conscientious workers. But as someone who has worked in strongly male dominated fields, electronic and mechanical, before diversity hiring became a thing, women entering those fields had to be damned good to overcome prejudices, in my observation.
Looking past tribes and viewing people as individuals has generally come easily for me, which might be the reason I seem to have been well received by people outside of my tribe. It's good that I've retired since I would probably find working with people who have a chip on their shoulder when it comes to intersectionality.
Absolutely. But few honestly debate him that I've found. Mostly he's portrayed as an old, malicious dinosaur trapped in his sense of white privilege. Or they dismiss his social scientific approach as fouled by white assumptions and a corrupt epistemology of logic and objectivity.
I remember when Bell Curve came out. Conservatives ate it up because it said black people are stupid and everyone with an education pointed out his abuses of statistics and it was widely believed that he already had his conclusions and played with statistics to back them up.
In interviews he sounded pretty mild, even earnest, but, well, you've read Gould.
I just took a quick look and it seems like the substance of the criticism is that "race" is too meaningless a concept to be a statistical category. I agree!! I just wish that the rest of the world did too. But sadly, we are going backwards on this if anything. Just spend 5 minutes reading anything by Ibram Kendi.
Speaking of the meaninglessness of racial categories, I just finished watching the Super Bowl. One of the things about racial discourse that has confounded me is that the slaveowner's concept of the "one drop" rule has been happily carried over into the 21st Century.
So, Rihanna and Patrick Mahomes are "black." What does this mean? Does it respect their choice? Does it refer to culture? If so, I'm down with that. But let's call it what it is. A choice. Does the rest of the world give Rihanna and Patrick Mahomes that choice? Maybe not. I just wish they didn't have to make it.
A difficulty in this kind of thing is that determining if there is a causation in correlation. Can unraveling that lead to a root cause or is it too complex to determine the root cause that people seek. With relative ease we can't find a statistical occurrence to support nearly any premise of it is what we seek. I could start a 200 comment discussion by mentioning some off them.
I didn't know the South had such a high crime rate. I'm not surprised. The uber-Christians also have very high divorce & teen pregnancy rates. I imagine the gun craziness contributes mightily to that, too.
That was one of the takeaways, but I was referencing how in "The Bell Curve" they did the proper regressions from the best available longitudinal studies. Did the regressions to compare apples to apples, etc. It looked good and I initially thought the criticism was formed in not liking what they found. The book, "The Missmeasure of Man" pointed out something I missed. I spent many years analyzing test data determining root cause of problems, but I am not a statistician, a subject deeper than it appears to be to a non-statistician like myself.
I don't think they lied although there is evidence that the presentation could be considered disingenuous. Perhaps it pertains to the last commentary where I opined that once you raise a flag in a hill you often sell yourself on something that can make you decide it's a hill to fire in when it isn't.
The problem here is that if you're starting from a nonsensical and hugely subjective categorisation of the data, no amount of statistical wizardry will produce valid results.
So many people in the US who appear to be "white" could also be categorised as "black" if the one-drop rule was enforced that the distinction is essentially self-referential. If you're poor, or caught breaking the law, you're so much more likely to be regarded as "black" that the stats are meaningless.
Add to that that many of those statistical tests developed by Fischer & Galton etc are increasingly regarded as unreliable precisely because of the subjective way they are used in sociology & psychology and you have a pseudoscientific mess. It's basically eugenics, and we all know where that leads.
Sure, Dave. But the one under consideration seems fairly cut and dried data wise. Youth, Ethnicity, Homicide as factors sure narrows things down. I'm sure the Justice Department stats could clear things up without too much controversey. I'm interested in significant correlations not causation. Exceptions always are available.
I first read this as a child, published 1954. It has been re-copyrighted, reprinted and is available as a Kindle book. Short, readable, cheap.
It goes to the heart of the matter here. A 300% increase sounds like a lot if you don't consider that it could indicate 3 occurrences in a population of 500,000,000 making it rare sand trivial.
Good stuff as always Steve. Just an FYI, you have "except" instead of "accept" in the first paragraph.
Oh God!😅 Thanks for that.
Accept or expect? Except didn't cut it.
My bad. I think I got carried away with the "e"s in that sentence and temporarily lost my mind.
It's buffering. You send the text to type to a cerebral buffer to type it while your foremind continues to compose new material. The buffer does aural language processing and chooses a homophonic substitution.
My buffering goes into high gear when I speak to an audience, I can compose later material while apparently focusing on the nuances of delivery. I never stutter when public-speaking but the defect that made me a (largely healed) stutterer allows me to run two verbal tracks at once.
I was wasted as a programmer.
The way you write it was obviously a minor brain glitch.
You know what Mark Twain said about statistics....I have never understood the obsessions with per centages in any situation....nor obsessions with color our race or any of that....having said that, to pretend that all is well in America's urban core, or that it's much ado about nothing or that it is the same everywhere is crazy.
I live in Detroit. I am white, although my father's father was off the boat from the deepest reaches of southern Italy and considered black by the Irish louts who ruled his neighborhood and terrorized his family. He became white through (Jesuit) (admission based on merit) schooling, which led to a PhD. My wife is black, black as can be. Born and raised in the bush in Kenya. Here are some observations, from both of us. I am well aware that correlation doesn't equal causation, that all of my stories are "anecdotal" (and thus generally perceived as having less value than "scientific" analysis)....I get it...
But still:
1. In my little corner of there world, in Detroit, which is 80=% black, as defined by the people themselves, the physical handling of firearms is so casual, so unsafe, so absolutely disconnected from the reality of what happens when that trigger is pulled or weapon dropped....it is mind blowing. There is an apparent close-to-total disconnect from the often-permanent consequences of what happens when a weapon is discharged that, to this day, after many years here, I can not wrap my head around. I'm not a squeamish liberal who shudders at the sight of a firearm. Every house had a gun where I grew up, and 4 years in the USMC infantry exposed me to a bunch more.
2. Related to point No.1 above, but distinct: the casualness with which disputes of ANY kind are settled with firearms as a FIRST resort is mind-boggling. When my neighbor called in her brother to assassinate her "man", casually, and her "man" (who wasn't even hit in the fusillade of gunfire) barely reacted to the gun battle (he was back with her 3-4 days later).....I could fill up Substack with moire non-scientific anecdotes like this... but
3. There is violence everywhere, but in the Detroit urban core (and seemingly in other cities) there is something----something--- going on that leads to off the charts rates of violence among African-Americans, more often men, but startlingly quite frequently women as well. The statistics, accurate or informative or not, on "black-on-black" violence are actually distorted by the "black" word....it is most definitively not "black" males...it is black-males-born-in-central/northern-American-cities who are both causing and being affected by the gun violence. The crime rate among African immigrants here is so negligible as to be unmeasurable....
4. My wife was recently called a "b**** wh***" by one of her students, a 6 year old boy. There are no consequences for that behavior, none, not even temporary suspension. When the mother of one of her students bursts into her classroom and says "I'm gonna f*** this b**** up", before she has even introduced herself, there are no consequences. When a 8-10 year old boy has reached into my work truck and stolen my phone and bought sneakers for his family and pizza for his boys using my CashApp, and is standing on the porch with a big smile while I'm trying to deal with his mother, and he is up on FB waving wads of $100 bills and cell phones, and there are NO consequences, none, it isn't a stretch to hazard a very educated guess that these kids are monsters in the making, and the mother in question is modeling behavior that makes it extremely likely that her children will be part of one set of grim statistics or an other.
5. So why is this? Is it the "hip-hop" culture? Too many video games? Really poor role modeling? A total breakdown of respect for anything? A lack of discipline at a really young age which leads to increasingly dysfunctional behavior? I don't know, but what I do know is that there is something unique in what I have seen here in terms of the casualness of gun violence. I have heard about, but not been exposed to the seemingly indiscriminate violence swirling around some of the Latin gangs, but that isn't part of my experience so I'll let others lead the way.
Great article, btw, and thought-provoking....as always.
I grew up in Saint Louis (left in 67 to enlist in the Marines) and went to an integrated vocational high school before they were generally integrated. As a white guy I was narrowly a minority. A large number came from the projects. It was a violent place. Before the age of guns, it was knives. Multiple stabbings and slashings every year. My locker was across the hall from the nurse's office in my freshman year and several times I couldn't go to it to swap book because there was a cop and a victim there.
An interesting observation was that the stabbings, slashings and one broken bottle to the face was black on black. One could conjure reasons. They were mostly in proximity to each other, people hung with their own. When a guy got stabbed rolling bones in the boy's room, you didn't see white guys gambling with black guys, so they weren't there to get stabbed. I whizzed and left quickly when that was going on.
Even back then I didn't see race as causal as much as environmental things were. People adapt to their environment and the projects were a bad environment to grow up in. Toxic culture spreads like cancer. I tend to view it as a cancer affecting (black in this case) people in the environment rather than the environment being what it is due to the racial makeup of that environment. What initiated that toxin is a whole subject where arguments tend to be more tribal than logic based.
I was raised in Texas and we moved to detroit in the sixties. We only stayed a couple of years. I was in the third grade and was constantly being beat up on by the black kids. They would gang up on me and push me to the ground, then they would all take turns hitting and kicking me. Soon I was sent to the school counselors office. The counselor asked me way those kids wanted to beat me up. My answer, “cause I’m from Texas.”
Now I know is was probably because I was a little red headed, blue eyed girl from Texas. They was just mad. And many are still mad today because they are never allowed to forget and move on like many many before them had to do.
No doubt. I'm 69. It's been ugly for a long time. But the new fashionable ugly where every white is racist is little better than every black is a criminal. This is why research that is honest and nuanced is critical. Your posts are some of the first expressions of courage and reason I have found on these issues anywhere other than McWhorter and Lourie. You however personalize it more without Lourie's conservative tilt on most everything. Thank you for the forum.
Good points. So looking at those qualifiers how do things shake out looking at young Asians in America, young whites in America at cetera? Does that change things substantially?
Yes, to control for race you make everything else ceteris paribus. So young male US Asians, Hispanics, Whites of common income and education compared with each other and with their Black counterparts. That's true apples to apples. Has anyone run the numbers this way? Seems pretty simple to do.
Read the criticism of "The Bell Curve" and you will see that it is not as simple as we would like it to be. The authors of that book did that but made the results of their study seem more significant than it was.
Not hard, considering most people have no grasp of statistics. And it's not easy to teach, introductory statistics is part of the undergraduate college curriculum.
What are your specific criticisms? I'll reread their analysis instead of just dismissing it as racist. Do you see this as a racist effort aside from your criticisms?
Charles Murray has been willing to debate, a standard Steve raised for taking someone seriously. I don't think it a matter of racism as some accuse. The book seemed compelling to me upon reading it and I like to think I hold racism in check. If you are my age you lived thru a hell of a lot of racist assumptions that leave callous in the face of honest effort to overcome it.
I never got in more trouble as a child than when I mentioned race. And though I've gone through a few periods of brief and mild bigotry I always overcame them, and several times I've had black friends and coworkers who told me in very direct terms that I was truly a decent person, that I didn't treat them poorly, nor overcompensate.
The one case I still have some trouble with is Indians. Dot, not feather. There are a lot of H1-Bs in software and a lot of the are really obnoxious and have a terrible work ethic, but that's culture. And before Microsoft added American Hygiene Expectations to new employee orientation in India, a lot of them thought showering more than weekly would make their skin come off, and the BO was enough to make your eyes water.
In 2020 I had an Indian coworker who was probably the worst in every way; he had no pride in his work, did the least he could get away with, did lousy work, and boasted about clearing tasks, however shabbily, was uncommunicative to the point that I had to escalate to management, something I really dislike doing. I struggled to see him as "a lousy coworker" and not as "an Indian." In the end, I wrote up the experience on Medium and made almost $3000 on that one article, buying a nice Moog with the money. I never mentioned his nationality but I didn't have to, so, of course, I got a few jabs of "racist" but for every one of those I had a dozen for whom the article was resonant af.
I did a great deal of international travel, mostly working with people, rather than as a tourist which makes quite a difference in how you get to know people. I never got sent to India, I was not the only traveler in the org. My "strong" people experience was elsewhere but I have developed an ability to tolerate horrible smells.
I worked with what were first wave H1-B workers in my industry and had a manager who led the way in hiring where most managers were a bit more reluctant. Her difficulty, which became mine as a mentor, was that she was able to hire software types, but we were hardware test and you had to understand electronic hardware to write software that did the job. It's a narrow niche field.
At the risk of sounding sexist, I found the women to be harder, conscientious workers. But as someone who has worked in strongly male dominated fields, electronic and mechanical, before diversity hiring became a thing, women entering those fields had to be damned good to overcome prejudices, in my observation.
Looking past tribes and viewing people as individuals has generally come easily for me, which might be the reason I seem to have been well received by people outside of my tribe. It's good that I've retired since I would probably find working with people who have a chip on their shoulder when it comes to intersectionality.
Absolutely. But few honestly debate him that I've found. Mostly he's portrayed as an old, malicious dinosaur trapped in his sense of white privilege. Or they dismiss his social scientific approach as fouled by white assumptions and a corrupt epistemology of logic and objectivity.
I remember when Bell Curve came out. Conservatives ate it up because it said black people are stupid and everyone with an education pointed out his abuses of statistics and it was widely believed that he already had his conclusions and played with statistics to back them up.
In interviews he sounded pretty mild, even earnest, but, well, you've read Gould.
Where do I read this criticism? Can you summarize it? Seems like very simple and straightforward statistical analysis to me.
https://open.substack.com/pub/steveqj/p/you-just-need-to-look-beyond-correlation
Good discussion.
I just took a quick look and it seems like the substance of the criticism is that "race" is too meaningless a concept to be a statistical category. I agree!! I just wish that the rest of the world did too. But sadly, we are going backwards on this if anything. Just spend 5 minutes reading anything by Ibram Kendi.
Did I understand you correctly Dave?
Speaking of the meaninglessness of racial categories, I just finished watching the Super Bowl. One of the things about racial discourse that has confounded me is that the slaveowner's concept of the "one drop" rule has been happily carried over into the 21st Century.
So, Rihanna and Patrick Mahomes are "black." What does this mean? Does it respect their choice? Does it refer to culture? If so, I'm down with that. But let's call it what it is. A choice. Does the rest of the world give Rihanna and Patrick Mahomes that choice? Maybe not. I just wish they didn't have to make it.
The book that Chris recommended in the comments is a good read on the subject.
A difficulty in this kind of thing is that determining if there is a causation in correlation. Can unraveling that lead to a root cause or is it too complex to determine the root cause that people seek. With relative ease we can't find a statistical occurrence to support nearly any premise of it is what we seek. I could start a 200 comment discussion by mentioning some off them.
All things being the same "ceteris parabus" is always a welcome concept ;0) But do we have the courage to make the comparisons?
I didn't know the South had such a high crime rate. I'm not surprised. The uber-Christians also have very high divorce & teen pregnancy rates. I imagine the gun craziness contributes mightily to that, too.
That was one of the takeaways, but I was referencing how in "The Bell Curve" they did the proper regressions from the best available longitudinal studies. Did the regressions to compare apples to apples, etc. It looked good and I initially thought the criticism was formed in not liking what they found. The book, "The Missmeasure of Man" pointed out something I missed. I spent many years analyzing test data determining root cause of problems, but I am not a statistician, a subject deeper than it appears to be to a non-statistician like myself.
I don't think they lied although there is evidence that the presentation could be considered disingenuous. Perhaps it pertains to the last commentary where I opined that once you raise a flag in a hill you often sell yourself on something that can make you decide it's a hill to fire in when it isn't.
" they did the proper regressions"...
The problem here is that if you're starting from a nonsensical and hugely subjective categorisation of the data, no amount of statistical wizardry will produce valid results.
So many people in the US who appear to be "white" could also be categorised as "black" if the one-drop rule was enforced that the distinction is essentially self-referential. If you're poor, or caught breaking the law, you're so much more likely to be regarded as "black" that the stats are meaningless.
Add to that that many of those statistical tests developed by Fischer & Galton etc are increasingly regarded as unreliable precisely because of the subjective way they are used in sociology & psychology and you have a pseudoscientific mess. It's basically eugenics, and we all know where that leads.
Sure, Dave. But the one under consideration seems fairly cut and dried data wise. Youth, Ethnicity, Homicide as factors sure narrows things down. I'm sure the Justice Department stats could clear things up without too much controversey. I'm interested in significant correlations not causation. Exceptions always are available.
I first read this as a child, published 1954. It has been re-copyrighted, reprinted and is available as a Kindle book. Short, readable, cheap.
It goes to the heart of the matter here. A 300% increase sounds like a lot if you don't consider that it could indicate 3 occurrences in a population of 500,000,000 making it rare sand trivial.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728/ref=asc_df_0393310728/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid