统计学的思想和各种统计数据对政府、社会乃至我们的工作和日常生活都产生着直接的影响，这种影响可能远远超乎你的想像。通过阅读本书，你将对我们这个世界有一个更完整、更清晰的认识。
本书一点儿也不枯燥乏味，恰恰相反，它是那样生动有趣，深入浅出地把统计学的概念和分析方法呈现在你面前。通过一个个真实的小故事，本书能让你在会心的微笑中不知不觉地增长专业知识，提高分析水平。这是一本能给你带来乐趣的书，也是一本能让你更加睿智的书。

"McCloskey and Ziliak have been pushing this very elementary, very correct, very important argument through several articles over several years and for reasons I cannot fathom it is still resisted. If it takes a book to get it across, I hope this book will do it. It ought to."--Thomas Schelling, Distinguished University Professor, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, and 2005 Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics "With humor, insight, piercing logic and a nod to history, Ziliak and McCloskey show how economists--and other scientists--suffer from a mass delusion about statistical analysis. The quest for statistical significance that pervades science today is a deeply flawed substitute for thoughtful analysis. . . . Yet few participants in the scientific bureaucracy have been willing to admit what Ziliak and McCloskey make clear: the emperor has no clothes."--Kenneth Rothman, Professor of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Health "The Cult of Statistical Significance" shows, field by field, how "statistical significance," a technique that dominates many sciences, has been a huge mistake. The authors find that researchers in a broad spectrum of fields, from agronomy to zoology, employ "testing" that doesn't test and "estimating" that doesn't estimate. The facts will startle the outside reader: how could a group of brilliant scientists wander so far from scientific magnitudes? This study will encourage scientists who want to know how to get the statistical sciences back on track and fulfill their quantitative promise. The book shows for the first time how wide the disaster is, and how bad for science, and it traces the problem to its historical, sociological, and philosophical roots. Stephen T. Ziliak is the author or editor of many articles and two books. He currently lives in Chicago, where he is Professor of Economics at Roosevelt University. Deirdre N. McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of twenty books and three hundred scholarly articles. She has held Guggenheim and National Humanities Fellowships. She is best known for "How to Be Human* Though an Economist "(University of Michigan Press, 2000) and her most recent book, "The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce "(2006).

《20世纪统计怎样变革了科学:女士品茶》以某位喝茶的英国女士的假设学说为起点，引出了近代数理统计的开创者——费歇尔，以及费歇尔为解决类似问题而发明的实验设计法。书中细数了二十世纪参与这场科学变革的代表性人物与事迹。

At a summer tea party in Cambridge, England, a lady states that tea poured into milk tastes differently than that of milk poured into tea. Her notion is shouted down by the scientific minds of the group. But one guest, by the name Ronald Aylmer Fisher, proposes to scientifically test the lady's hypothesis. There was no better person to conduct such a test. For Fisher had brought to the field of statistics an emphasis on controlling the methods for obtaining data and the importance of interpretation. He knew that how the data was gathered and applied was as important as the data themselves.
In The Lady Tasting Tea, readers will encounter not only Ronald Fisher's theories (and their repercussions), but the ideas of dozens of men and women whose revolutionary work affects our everyday lives. Writing with verve and wit, author David Salsburg traces the rise and fall of Karl Pearson's theories, explores W. Edwards Deming's statistical methods of quality control (which rebuilt postwar Japan's economy), and relates the story of Stella Cunliff's early work on the capacity of small beer casks at the Guinness brewing factory.
The Lady Tasting Tea is not a book of dry facts and figures, but the history of great individuals who dared to look at the world in a new way.