andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-13 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: See here (if you care). P.S. Kaus writes that, when he was on William Bennett’s radio show, “Bennett immediately zeroed in on a key political mystery: Are African-American voters on board with the Democrats’ recent amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants program?” I wonder if Kaus asked Bennett about this quote : But I [Bennett] do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. As Brendan Nyhan notes, Bennett wasn’t actually suggesting that black babies be aborted–in fact, Bennett said, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” Bennett definitely sounds like the go-to guy for a savvy discussion of the black vote! P.P.S. Just to clarify for those who might think that Bennett was simply calling-it-like-it-is, albeit in a politically incorrect style . . . On his Fre
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Kaus writes that, when he was on William Bennett’s radio show, “Bennett immediately zeroed in on a key political mystery: Are African-American voters on board with the Democrats’ recent amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants program? [sent-4, score-0.056]
2 ” I wonder if Kaus asked Bennett about this quote : But I [Bennett] do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. [sent-5, score-1.229]
3 As Brendan Nyhan notes, Bennett wasn’t actually suggesting that black babies be aborted–in fact, Bennett said, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. [sent-6, score-0.947]
4 ” Bennett definitely sounds like the go-to guy for a savvy discussion of the black vote! [sent-7, score-0.219]
5 Just to clarify for those who might think that Bennett was simply calling-it-like-it-is, albeit in a politically incorrect style . [sent-11, score-0.106]
6 On his Freakonomics blog, Steven Levitt supported Bennett’s reasoning, as follows: If we lived in a world in which the government chose who gets to reproduce, then Bennett would be correct in saying that “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. [sent-14, score-1.349]
7 ” Of course, it would also be true that if we aborted every white, Asian, male, Republican, and Democratic baby in that world, crime would also fall. [sent-15, score-0.884]
8 As John DiNardo points out, Levitt seems to be confusing the number of crimes with the crime rate . [sent-19, score-0.577]
9 Beyond this, the intervention being hypothesized would certainly have many effects, and it is highly doubtful that the result would be to leave the crime rate among non-blacks unchanged. [sent-21, score-0.803]
10 This is pretty basic causal reasoning, although given what I’ve heard about ed schools (sorry, Jennifer! [sent-22, score-0.108]
11 ), I guess it’s not completely unsurprising that a former Secretary of Education could get confused on the matter. [sent-23, score-0.064]
12 With a more dynamic education system, less bound by bureaucratic constraints, we’d surely be appointing cabinet-level education who had a better understanding of causal inference. [sent-25, score-0.417]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('bennett', 0.715), ('crime', 0.323), ('kaus', 0.192), ('black', 0.163), ('abort', 0.152), ('aborted', 0.152), ('rate', 0.15), ('baby', 0.142), ('education', 0.096), ('levitt', 0.091), ('would', 0.075), ('reasoning', 0.072), ('doubtful', 0.071), ('every', 0.07), ('country', 0.069), ('bureaucratic', 0.064), ('unsurprising', 0.064), ('unions', 0.062), ('dinardo', 0.061), ('secretary', 0.061), ('causal', 0.061), ('morally', 0.06), ('hypothesized', 0.059), ('mystery', 0.059), ('albeit', 0.058), ('radio', 0.056), ('savvy', 0.056), ('sole', 0.056), ('nyhan', 0.055), ('brendan', 0.054), ('crimes', 0.054), ('asian', 0.054), ('reproduce', 0.053), ('lived', 0.052), ('go', 0.051), ('bound', 0.051), ('babies', 0.05), ('chose', 0.05), ('intervention', 0.05), ('confusing', 0.05), ('male', 0.05), ('dynamic', 0.049), ('incorrect', 0.048), ('theme', 0.048), ('william', 0.048), ('freakonomics', 0.047), ('true', 0.047), ('ed', 0.047), ('ridiculous', 0.047), ('world', 0.046)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0 13 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-30-Things I learned from the Mickey Kaus for Senate campaign
Introduction: See here (if you care). P.S. Kaus writes that, when he was on William Bennett’s radio show, “Bennett immediately zeroed in on a key political mystery: Are African-American voters on board with the Democrats’ recent amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants program?” I wonder if Kaus asked Bennett about this quote : But I [Bennett] do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. As Brendan Nyhan notes, Bennett wasn’t actually suggesting that black babies be aborted–in fact, Bennett said, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” Bennett definitely sounds like the go-to guy for a savvy discussion of the black vote! P.P.S. Just to clarify for those who might think that Bennett was simply calling-it-like-it-is, albeit in a politically incorrect style . . . On his Fre
2 0.19788063 356 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-20-Ranking on crime rankings
Introduction: Following up on our discussion of crime rates–surprisingly (to me), Detroit’s violent crime rate was only 75% more than Minneapolis’s–Chris Uggen pointed me to this warning from Richard Rosenfeld and Janet Lauritsen about comparative crime stats.
Introduction: Solomon Hsiang writes : I [Hsiang] have posted about high temperature inducing individuals to exhibit more violent behavior when driving, playing baseball and prowling bars. These cases are neat anecdotes that let us see the “pure aggression” response in lab-like conditions. But they don’t affect most of us too much. But violent crime in the real world affects everyone. Earlier, I posted a paper by Jacob et al. that looked at assault in the USA for about a decade – they found that higher temperatures lead to more assault and that the rise in violent crimes rose more quickly than the analogous rise in non-violent property-crime, an indicator that there is a “pure aggression” component to the rise in violent crime. A new working paper “Crime, Weather, and Climate Change” by recent Harvard grad Matthew Ranson puts together an impressive data set of all types of crime in USA counties for 50 years. The results tell the aggression story using street-level data very clearly [click to
4 0.18082409 353 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-19-The violent crime rate was about 75% higher in Detroit than in Minneapolis in 2009
Introduction: Christopher Uggen reports . I’m surprised the difference is so small. I would’ve thought the crime rate was something like 5 times higher in Detroit than in Minneapolis. I guess Minneapolis must have some rough neighborhoods. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t have a good framework for thinking about crime statistics.
5 0.13343464 1852 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-12-Crime novels for economists
Introduction: Following up on this post by Noah Smith on economics in science fiction, Mark Palko writes on economics in crime fiction. Just as almost all science fiction is ultimately about politics, one could say that just about all crime fiction is about economics. But if I had to pick one crime novelist with an economics focus, I’d pick George V. Higgins. In one of his novels, his character Jerry Kennedy had a riff on the difference between guys who get a salary and guys who have to work for every dollar. But, really, almost all his novels are full of economics.
6 0.12667643 1386 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-21-Belief in hell is associated with lower crime rates
7 0.12445134 333 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-10-Psychiatric drugs and the reduction in crime
8 0.12016144 716 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-17-Is the internet causing half the rapes in Norway? I wanna see the scatterplot.
9 0.098986141 1316 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-12-black and Black, white and White
10 0.094229154 1100 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-05-Freakonomics: Why ask “What went wrong?”
11 0.090068035 1296 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-03-Google Translate for code, and an R help-list bot
12 0.084463306 1650 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-03-Did Steven Levitt really believe in 2008 that Obama “would be the greatest president in history”?
13 0.077380739 170 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-29-When is expertise relevant?
14 0.07664825 709 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-13-D. Kahneman serves up a wacky counterfactual
15 0.0755127 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
16 0.072796531 1249 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-06-Thinking seriously about social science research
17 0.07267455 1060 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-15-Freakonomics: What went wrong?
19 0.069455892 475 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-19-All politics are local — not
20 0.068707541 125 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-02-The moral of the story is, Don’t look yourself up on Google
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.101), (1, -0.056), (2, 0.048), (3, 0.02), (4, -0.024), (5, -0.001), (6, 0.01), (7, 0.021), (8, 0.02), (9, 0.009), (10, -0.047), (11, 0.0), (12, -0.015), (13, 0.001), (14, 0.013), (15, -0.004), (16, 0.025), (17, 0.044), (18, -0.025), (19, 0.041), (20, -0.021), (21, 0.002), (22, 0.041), (23, 0.005), (24, 0.045), (25, -0.055), (26, -0.005), (27, 0.004), (28, 0.032), (29, 0.007), (30, 0.031), (31, -0.01), (32, -0.047), (33, -0.003), (34, -0.057), (35, 0.031), (36, -0.02), (37, -0.009), (38, 0.01), (39, 0.038), (40, -0.051), (41, -0.02), (42, -0.038), (43, -0.006), (44, 0.011), (45, 0.031), (46, -0.028), (47, -0.011), (48, 0.036), (49, 0.028)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.92077982 13 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-30-Things I learned from the Mickey Kaus for Senate campaign
Introduction: See here (if you care). P.S. Kaus writes that, when he was on William Bennett’s radio show, “Bennett immediately zeroed in on a key political mystery: Are African-American voters on board with the Democrats’ recent amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants program?” I wonder if Kaus asked Bennett about this quote : But I [Bennett] do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. As Brendan Nyhan notes, Bennett wasn’t actually suggesting that black babies be aborted–in fact, Bennett said, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” Bennett definitely sounds like the go-to guy for a savvy discussion of the black vote! P.P.S. Just to clarify for those who might think that Bennett was simply calling-it-like-it-is, albeit in a politically incorrect style . . . On his Fre
Introduction: I get suspicious when I hear unsourced claims that unnamed experts somewhere are making foolish statements. For example, I recently came across this, from a Super Bowl-themed article from 2006 by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt: As it happens, there is one betting strategy that will routinely beat a bookie, and you don’t even have to be smart to use it. One of the most undervalued N.F.L. bets is the home underdog — a team favored to lose but playing in its home stadium. If you had bet $5,000 on the home underdog in every N.F.L. game over the past two decades, you would be up about $150,000 by now (a winning rate of roughly 53 percent). So far, so good. I wonder if this pattern still holds. But then Dubner and Levitt continue: This fact has led some academics to conclude that bookmakers simply aren’t very smart. If an academic researcher can find this loophole, shouldn’t a professional bookie be able to? But the fact is most bookies are doing just fine. So could it be
Introduction: In the interview we discussed a couple months ago, Steven Levitt said: I [Levitt] voted for Obama [in 2008] because I wanted to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Obama. And I thought that he would be the greatest president in history. This surprised me. I’d assumed Levitt was a McCain supporter! Why? Because in October, 2008, he wrote that he “loved” the claim by conservative University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan that “the current unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is not alarming.” I’d read that at the time, perhaps incorrectly, as Mulligan making an election-season pitch that the economy was doing just fine (Mulligan: “if you are not employed by the financial industry (94 percent of you are not), don’t worry”) hence implicitly an argument for a Republican vote in that year (given the usual rules of retrospective voting that the incumbent party gets punished by a poor economy). And I correspondingly (and, it seems, incorrectly) read Levitt’s endorsement of Mu
4 0.67428321 170 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-29-When is expertise relevant?
Introduction: Responding to journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s negative review of Freakonomics 2 in the New Yorker, Stephen Dubner writes , that, although they do not have any training in climate science, it’s also the case that: Neither of us [Levitt and Dubner] were Ku Klux Klan members either, or sumo wrestlers or Realtors or abortion providers or schoolteachers or even pimps. And yet somehow we managed to write about all that without any horse dung (well, not much at least) flying our way. But Levitt is a schoolteacher (at the University of Chicago)! And, of course, you don’t have to be a sumo wrestler to be (some kind of an) expert on sumo wrestling, nor do you have to teach in the K-12 system to be an expert in education, nor do you have to provide abortions to be an expert on abortion, etc. And Levitt has had quite a bit of horse dung thrown at him for the abortion research. The connection is that abortion and climate change matter to a lot of people, while sumo wrestling and pimps and
5 0.65411872 943 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-04-Flip it around
Introduction: Mark Palko discusses a radio interview on the effect of parents on children’s education. In short, the interviewer (Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame) claims that the research shows that parents don’t have much influence on whether their children go to college. The evidence is based on a comparison of adopted and non-adopted children. Palko makes a convincing case that the statistical analysis (by economist Bruce Sacerdote) doesn’t show what Dubner says it shows. I looked over the linked transcript, and overall I’m less unhappy than Palko is about the interview. I agree that some of the causal implications are sloppy, and I think it’s a bit silly for the interviewer (Kai Ryssdal) to use celebrities as a benchmark. (Ryssdal says, “if [a certain parenting style is] good enough for Steven Levitt, it’s good enough for me.” But Levitt is a multimillionaire—he’ll always have a huge financial cushion. It’s not clear that what works for him would work for others who are not so wel
8 0.64157552 993 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-05-The sort of thing that gives technocratic reasoning a bad name
9 0.62957168 356 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-20-Ranking on crime rankings
10 0.62812757 624 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-22-A question about the economic benefits of universities
11 0.62748259 1491 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-10-Update on Levitt paper on child car seats
13 0.61482716 1456 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Macro, micro, and conflicts of interest
15 0.60457969 149 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Demographics: what variable best predicts a financial crisis?
16 0.60257012 1100 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-05-Freakonomics: Why ask “What went wrong?”
17 0.59851712 353 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-19-The violent crime rate was about 75% higher in Detroit than in Minneapolis in 2009
18 0.58666557 339 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-13-Battle of the NYT opinion-page economists
19 0.56100601 1692 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-25-Freakonomics Experiments
20 0.55854964 508 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-08-More evidence of growing nationalization of congressional elections
topicId topicWeight
[(9, 0.015), (16, 0.063), (21, 0.048), (24, 0.116), (42, 0.017), (47, 0.016), (55, 0.08), (76, 0.013), (86, 0.017), (90, 0.038), (97, 0.157), (98, 0.036), (99, 0.212)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.93418872 882 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-31-Meanwhile, on the sister blog . . .
Introduction: NYT columnist Douthat asks: Should we be disturbed that a leading presidential candidate endorses a pro-slavery position? Who’s on the web? And where are they? Sowell, Carlson, Barone: fools, knaves, or simply victims of a cognitive illusion? Don’t blame the American public for the D.C. deadlock Calvin College update Help reform the Institutional Review Board (IRB) system! Powerful credit-rating agencies are a creation of the government . . . what does it mean when they bite the hand that feeds them? “Waiting for a landslide” A simple theory of why Obama didn’t come out fighting in 2009 A modest proposal Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Family Research Council and the Barnard Center for Research on Women Sleazy data miners Genetic essentialism is in our genes Wow, that was a lot! No wonder I don’t get any research done…
same-blog 2 0.92511427 13 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-30-Things I learned from the Mickey Kaus for Senate campaign
Introduction: See here (if you care). P.S. Kaus writes that, when he was on William Bennett’s radio show, “Bennett immediately zeroed in on a key political mystery: Are African-American voters on board with the Democrats’ recent amnesty-for-illegal-immigrants program?” I wonder if Kaus asked Bennett about this quote : But I [Bennett] do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. As Brendan Nyhan notes, Bennett wasn’t actually suggesting that black babies be aborted–in fact, Bennett said, “That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.” Bennett definitely sounds like the go-to guy for a savvy discussion of the black vote! P.P.S. Just to clarify for those who might think that Bennett was simply calling-it-like-it-is, albeit in a politically incorrect style . . . On his Fre
3 0.90879321 996 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-07-Chi-square FAIL when many cells have small expected values
Introduction: William Perkins, Mark Tygert, and Rachel Ward write : If a discrete probability distribution in a model being tested for goodness-of-fit is not close to uniform, then forming the Pearson χ2 statistic can involve division by nearly zero. This often leads to serious trouble in practice — even in the absence of round-off errors . . . The problem is not merely that the chi-squared statistic doesn’t have the advertised chi-squared distribution —a reference distribution can always be computed via simulation, either using the posterior predictive distribution or by conditioning on a point estimate of the cell expectations and then making a degrees-of-freedom sort of adjustment. Rather, the problem is that, when there are lots of cells with near-zero expectation, the chi-squared test is mostly noise. And this is not merely a theoretical problem. It comes up in real examples. Here’s one, taken from the classic 1992 genetics paper of Guo and Thomspson: And here are the e
4 0.90853316 1573 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-11-Incredibly strange spam
Introduction: Unsolicited (of course) in the email the other day: Just wanted to touch base with you to see if you needed any quotes on Parking lot lighting or Garage Lighting? (Induction, LED, Canopy etc…) We help retrofit 1000′s of garages around the country. Let me know your specs and ill send you a quote in 24 hours. ** Owner Emergency Lights Co. Ill indeed. . . .
Introduction: Earlier today, Nate criticized a U.S. military survey that asks troops the question, “Do you currently serve with a male or female Service member you believe to be homosexual.” [emphasis added] As Nate points out, by asking this question in such a speculative way, “it would seem that you’ll be picking up a tremendous number of false positives–soldiers who are believed to be gay, but aren’t–and that these false positives will swamp any instances in which soldiers (in spite of DADT) are actually somewhat open about their same-sex attractions.” This is a general problem in survey research. In an article in Chance magazine in 1997, “The myth of millions of annual self-defense gun uses: a case study of survey overestimates of rare events” [see here for related references], David Hemenway uses the false-positive, false-negative reasoning to explain this bias in terms of probability theory. Misclassifications that induce seemingly minor biases in estimates of certain small probab
6 0.89754111 160 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-23-Unhappy with improvement by a factor of 10^29
7 0.88685793 1001 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-10-Three hours in the life of a statistician
10 0.84955591 526 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-19-“If it saves the life of a single child…” and other nonsense
11 0.8477236 820 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-25-Design of nonrandomized cluster sample study
12 0.84319913 1694 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-26-Reflections on ethicsblogging
13 0.83388901 115 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-28-Whassup with those crappy thrillers?
14 0.83327425 1335 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-21-Responding to a bizarre anti-social-science screed
15 0.83165145 2118 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-30-???
16 0.83118784 18 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-06-$63,000 worth of abusive research . . . or just a really stupid waste of time?
17 0.83076847 15 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-03-Public Opinion on Health Care Reform
18 0.8302021 2121 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-02-Should personal genetic testing be regulated? Battle of the blogroll
19 0.82883179 1812 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-19-Chomsky chomsky chomsky chomsky furiously
20 0.82709348 168 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-28-Colorless green, and clueless