Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-267) and index

What's the point? -- Descriptive statistics : who was the best baseball player of all time? -- Deceptive description : "he's got a great personality!" and other true but grossly misleading statements -- Correlation : how does Netflix know what movies I like? -- Basic probability : don't buy the extended warranty on your $99 printer -- The Monty Hall problem -- Problems with probability : how overconfident math geeks nearly destroyed the global financial system -- The importance of data : "garbage in, garbage out" -- The central limit theorem : the Lebron James of statistics -- Inference : why my statistics professor thought I might have cheated -- Polling : how we know that 64 percent of Americans support the death penalty (with a sampling error (plus or minus) 3 percent) -- Regression analysis : the miracle elixir -- Common regression mistakes : the mandatory warning label -- Program evaluation : will going to Harvard change your life? -- Conclusion : five questions that statistics can help answer -- Appendix: Statistical software

Demystifies the study of statistics by stripping away the technical details to examine the underlying intuition essential for understanding statistical concepts