arts of mathematical deception. we re glad you re both here. charles, if your book were turned into a tv show for fox, it could be called when numbers attack. what is it about numbers? why do we love them so much? why do we tend to believe things more when there is a number attached to it? numbers have the aura of truth. we think like mathematicians that these things are pure and unsullied by human touching. but in fact, real world numbers don t have that purity that we humans generate numbers and we generate them through measurements or through other means and those measurements are flawed. as a result, the numbers are flawed. rick: now, doug, you re someone who made a career out of crunching and then interpreting numbers. so you put a lot of faith in them. i do. rick: do you have any concerns about them? i do have concerns. i d say at the outset, rick, statistical rigor is important and if you have statistical