Folks,
With the quadrennial American exercise in rhetorical excess well under way to elect the Leader of the Free World[tm] (no apologies to so-called "free countries" who don't get a vote), I thought this extract from the 1930 book "Straight and Crooked Thinking" might be worthwhile reading:
http://www.246.dk/38tricks.html
Rather than a scholarly listing of logical fallacies, the book (and this brief extract) aims to be a practical and useful guide:
"Practical convenience and practical importance are the criteria I have used in this list. If we have a plague of flies in the house we buy fly-papers and not a treatise on the zoological classification of Musca domestica."
As a bonus, in keeping with the discussion of SPSS and "figures that lie," the above-linked page also contains a list of ways to make misleading graphs.
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Rule 1: Show as little data as possible (minimize the data density)
Rule 2: Hide the data you do show (minimize the data/ink ratio)
Rule 3: Ignore the visual metaphor altogether
Rule 4: Only order matters
Rule 5: Graph data out of context
Rule 6: Change scales in mid-axis
Rule 7: Emphasize the trivial (ignore the important)
Rule 8: Jiggle the baseline
Rule 9: Alabama first!
Rule 10: Label: (a) illegibly, (b) incompletely, (c) incorrectly,
and (d) ambiguously
Rule 11: More is murkier: (a) more decimal places and
(b) more dimensions
Rule 12: If it has been done well in the past, think of a new way
to do it-----
Over and Out,
Dave
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