How Not To Lie With Statistics

"What is truth?" and "What is a lie?" are questions that have drawn the attention of philosophers, theologians, legal scholars and intellectuals of many kinds for centuries. I am not a scholar or intellectual, merely a hardhat statistician working in marketing research and what is vaguely called data science. Regardless of what we do for a living, however, all of us are consumers of statistics at work and in our daily lives. "Statistics" can refer to figures or mathematical models, and either can be used to deceive us, are often misinterpreted or can be flat out wrong. Deception in various forms can be found in nature, and pet owners may have noticed that it is not exclusively a human trait.