andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-49 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Rajiv Sethi quotes Bentley University economics professor Scott Sumner writing on the first anniversary of his blog: Be careful what you wish for. Last February 2nd I [Sumner] started this blog with very low expectations… I knew I wasn’t a good writer . . . And I was also pretty sure that the content was not of much interest to anyone. Now my biggest problem is time–I spend 6 to 10 hours a day on the blog, seven days a week. Several hours are spent responding to reader comments and the rest is spent writing long-winded posts and checking other economics blogs. . . . I [Sumner] don’t think much of the official methodology in macroeconomics. Many of my fellow economists seem to have a Popperian view of the social sciences. You develop a model. You go out and get some data. And then you try to refute the model with some sort of regression analysis. . . . My problem with this view is that it doesn’t reflect the way macro and finance actually work. Instead the models are
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Rajiv Sethi quotes Bentley University economics professor Scott Sumner writing on the first anniversary of his blog: Be careful what you wish for. [sent-1, score-0.21]
2 Now my biggest problem is time–I spend 6 to 10 hours a day on the blog, seven days a week. [sent-6, score-0.15]
3 Several hours are spent responding to reader comments and the rest is spent writing long-winded posts and checking other economics blogs. [sent-7, score-0.397]
4 But I don’t consider the results of a statistical regression to be a test of a model, rather they represent a piece of descriptive statistics, like a graph, which may or may not usefully supplement a more complex argument that relies on many different methods . [sent-26, score-0.129]
5 ) Sumner also writes: I suppose it wasn’t a smart career move to spend so much time on the blog. [sent-38, score-0.231]
6 If I had ignored my commenters I could have had my manuscript revised by now. [sent-39, score-0.144]
7 I agree with Sethi that Sumner’s post is interesting and captures much of the blogging experience. [sent-45, score-0.241]
8 But I don’t agree with that last bit about it being a bad career move. [sent-46, score-0.176]
9 (Rajiv Sethi, too, might be able to put together a book or some coherent articles by tying together his recent blog entries. [sent-53, score-0.198]
10 is blogging ever really bad for an academic career? [sent-57, score-0.319]
11 I imagine that some academics spend lots of time on blogs that nobody reads, and that could definitely be bad for their careers in an opportunity-cost sort of way. [sent-59, score-0.34]
12 Others such as Steven Levitt or Dan Ariely blog in an often-interesting but sometimes careless sort of way. [sent-60, score-0.184]
13 This might be bad for their careers, but quite possibly they’ve reached a level of fame in which this sort of thing can’t really hurt them anymore. [sent-61, score-0.179]
14 (Personally I think I’m as careful in everything I blog as in my published research–take this one however you want! [sent-64, score-0.132]
15 –and I welcome blogging as a way to put ideas out there and often get useful criticism. [sent-65, score-0.192]
16 My impression is that Sumner and Sethi feel the same way, but authors who have reached the bestseller level probably just don’t have the time to read their blog comments. [sent-66, score-0.149]
17 ) And then of course there are the many many bloggers, academic and otherwise, whose work I assume I would’ve encountered much more rarely were they not blogging. [sent-67, score-0.269]
18 The other issue that Sethi touches on in is the role of blogging in economic discourse. [sent-68, score-0.241]
19 Which brings us to the (“reverse causal”) question of why there are so many prominent academic bloggers from economics (also sociology and law, it appears) but not so many in political science or psychology or, for that matter, statistics. [sent-69, score-0.353]
20 Physics Today is the monthly magazine of the American Physical Society, and it’s fun to read. [sent-72, score-0.126]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 49 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-24-Blogging
Introduction: Rajiv Sethi quotes Bentley University economics professor Scott Sumner writing on the first anniversary of his blog: Be careful what you wish for. Last February 2nd I [Sumner] started this blog with very low expectations… I knew I wasn’t a good writer . . . And I was also pretty sure that the content was not of much interest to anyone. Now my biggest problem is time–I spend 6 to 10 hours a day on the blog, seven days a week. Several hours are spent responding to reader comments and the rest is spent writing long-winded posts and checking other economics blogs. . . . I [Sumner] don’t think much of the official methodology in macroeconomics. Many of my fellow economists seem to have a Popperian view of the social sciences. You develop a model. You go out and get some data. And then you try to refute the model with some sort of regression analysis. . . . My problem with this view is that it doesn’t reflect the way macro and finance actually work. Instead the models are
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Introduction: Rajiv Sethi writes : I suspect that within a decade, blogs will be a cornerstone of research in economics. Many original and creative contributions to the discipline will first be communicated to the profession (and the world at large) in the form of blog posts, since the medium allows for material of arbitrary length, depth and complexity. Ideas first expressed in this form will make their way (with suitable attribution) into reading lists, doctoral dissertations and more conventionally refereed academic publications. And blogs will come to play a central role in the process of recruitment, promotion and reward at major research universities. This genie is not going back into its bottle. And he thinks this is a good thing: In fact, the refereeing process for blog posts is in some respects more rigorous than that for journal articles. Reports are numerous, non-anonymous, public, rapidly and efficiently produced, and collaboratively constructed. It is not obvious to me [Sethi]
3 0.15995884 390 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-02-Fragment of statistical autobiography
Introduction: I studied math and physics at MIT. To be more precise, I started in math as default–ever since I was two years old, I’ve thought of myself as a mathematician, and I always did well in math class, so it seemed like a natural fit. But I was concerned. In high school I’d been in the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad training program, and there I’d met kids who were clearly much much better at math than I was. In retrospect, I don’t think I was as bad as I’d thought at the time: there were 24 kids in the program, and I was probably around #20, if that, but I think a lot of the other kids had more practice working on “math olympiad”-type problems. Maybe I was really something like the tenth-best in the group. Tenth-best or twentieth-best, whatever it was, I reached a crisis of confidence around my sophomore or junior year in college. At MIT, I started right off taking advanced math classes, and somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t seeing the big picture. I was able to do the homework pr
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Introduction: I encourage you to check out our linked blogs . Here’s what they’re all about: Cognitive and Behavioral Science BPS Research Digest : I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it more often. There are a couple things that bother me, though. The blog is sponsored by the British Psychological Society, so this sounds pretty serious. But then they run things like advertising promotions sponsored by a textbook company and highlight iffy experimental claims. For example, in 2010 they ran a wholly uncritical post on the notorious Daryl Bem study that purported to find ESP. After being called on it in the comments, the blogger (Christian Jarrett) responded with, “The stats appear sound. . . . it’s a great study. Rigorously conducted” and even defended “the discussion of quantum physics in the paper.” To be fair, though, and as he points out in comments, Jarrett wrote of Bem’s study: “this isn’t proof of psi, far fr
5 0.12191953 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: Rajiv Sethi quotes Bentley University economics professor Scott Sumner writing on the first anniversary of his blog: Be careful what you wish for. Last February 2nd I [Sumner] started this blog with very low expectations… I knew I wasn’t a good writer . . . And I was also pretty sure that the content was not of much interest to anyone. Now my biggest problem is time–I spend 6 to 10 hours a day on the blog, seven days a week. Several hours are spent responding to reader comments and the rest is spent writing long-winded posts and checking other economics blogs. . . . I [Sumner] don’t think much of the official methodology in macroeconomics. Many of my fellow economists seem to have a Popperian view of the social sciences. You develop a model. You go out and get some data. And then you try to refute the model with some sort of regression analysis. . . . My problem with this view is that it doesn’t reflect the way macro and finance actually work. Instead the models are
2 0.85646218 865 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-22-Blogging is “destroying the business model for quality”?
Introduction: Journalist Jonathan Rauch writes that the internet is Sturgeon squared: This is the blogosphere. I’m not getting paid to be here. I’m here to get incredibly famous (in my case, even more incredibly famous) so that I can get paid somewhere else. . . . The average quality of newspapers and (published) novels is far, far better than the average quality of blog posts (and–ugh!–comments). This is because people pay for newspapers and novels. What distinguishes newspapers and novels is how much does not get published in them, because people won’t pay for it. Payment is a filter, and a pretty good one. Imperfect, of course. But pointing out the defects of the old model is merely changing the subject if the new model is worse. . . . Yes, the new model is bringing a lot of new content into being. But most of it is bad. And it’s displacing a lot of better content, by destroying the business model for quality. Even in the information economy, there’s no free lunch. . . . Yes, there’s g
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Introduction: I was thinking a bit more about Jonathan Rauch’s lament about the fading of the buggy-whip industry print journalism, in which he mocks bloggers, analogizes blogging to scribbling with spray paint on the side of a building, and writes that the blogosphere is “the single worst medium for sustained, and therefore grown-up, reading and writing and argumentation ever invented.” Yup. Worse than talk radio. Worse than cave painting. Worse than smoke signals, rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, woodcuts, spray-paint graffiti, and every other medium of communication ever invented. OK, he didn’t really mean it. Rauch actually has an ironclad argument here. He’s claiming, in a blog, that blogging is crap. Therefore, if he fills his blog with unsupported exaggerations, that’s fine, as he’s demonstrating that blogging is . . . crap. Not to pile on, but, hey, why not? I was curious what Rauch has blogged on lately, so I googled Jonathan Rauch blog and ended up at this site , which most recently
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Introduction: In high school and college I would write long assignments using a series of outlines. I’d start with a single sheet where I’d write down the key phrases, connect them with lines, and then write more and more phrases until the page was filled up. Then I’d write a series of outlines, culminating in a sentence-level outline that was roughly one line per sentence of the paper. Then I’d write. It worked pretty well. Or horribly, depending on how you look at it. I was able to produce 10-page papers etc. on time. But I think it crippled my writing style for years. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to write directly–to explain clearly what I’ve done and why. And I’m still working on the “why” part. There’s a thin line between verbosity and terseness. I went to MIT and my roommate was a computer science major. He wrote me a word processor on his Atari 800, which did the job pretty well. For my senior thesis I broke down and used the computers in campus. I formatted it in tro
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Introduction: Rajiv Sethi writes : I suspect that within a decade, blogs will be a cornerstone of research in economics. Many original and creative contributions to the discipline will first be communicated to the profession (and the world at large) in the form of blog posts, since the medium allows for material of arbitrary length, depth and complexity. Ideas first expressed in this form will make their way (with suitable attribution) into reading lists, doctoral dissertations and more conventionally refereed academic publications. And blogs will come to play a central role in the process of recruitment, promotion and reward at major research universities. This genie is not going back into its bottle. And he thinks this is a good thing: In fact, the refereeing process for blog posts is in some respects more rigorous than that for journal articles. Reports are numerous, non-anonymous, public, rapidly and efficiently produced, and collaboratively constructed. It is not obvious to me [Sethi]
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Introduction: Interesting mini-memoir from John Podhoretz about the Upper West Side, in his words, “the most affluent shtetl the world has ever seen.” The only part I can’t quite follow is his offhand remark, “It is an expensive place to live, but then it always was.” I always thought that, before 1985 or so, the Upper West Side wasn’t so upscale. People at Columbia tell all sorts of stories about how things used to be in the bad old days. I have one other comment. Before giving it, let me emphasize that enjoyed reading Podhoretz’s article and, by making the comment below, I’m not trying to shoot Podhoretz down; rather, I’m trying to help out by pointing out a habit in his writing that might be getting in the way of his larger messages. Podhoretz writes the following about slum clearance: Over the course of the next four years, 20 houses on the block would be demolished and replaced with a high school named for Louis Brandeis and a relocated elementary school. Of the 35 brownstones t
2 0.96961582 1404 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-03-Counting gays
Introduction: Gary Gates writes : In a recent study, the author of this article estimated that the self- identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community makes up 3.8 percent of the American population. The author’s estimate was far lower than many scholars and activists had contended, and it included a relatively high proportion of persons self-identifying as bisexuals. This article responds to two of the central criticisms that arose in the controversy that followed. First, in response to claims that his estimate did not account for people who are in the closet, the author describes how demographers might measure the size of the closet. Second, in response to those who either ignored the reported large incidence of bisexuality or misconstrued the meaning of that incidence, the Author considers how varying frameworks for conceptualizing sexual orientation might alter the ratio of lesbian or gay individuals to bisexuals. This article goes on to offer observations about the ch
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Introduction: Rajiv Sethi quotes Bentley University economics professor Scott Sumner writing on the first anniversary of his blog: Be careful what you wish for. Last February 2nd I [Sumner] started this blog with very low expectations… I knew I wasn’t a good writer . . . And I was also pretty sure that the content was not of much interest to anyone. Now my biggest problem is time–I spend 6 to 10 hours a day on the blog, seven days a week. Several hours are spent responding to reader comments and the rest is spent writing long-winded posts and checking other economics blogs. . . . I [Sumner] don’t think much of the official methodology in macroeconomics. Many of my fellow economists seem to have a Popperian view of the social sciences. You develop a model. You go out and get some data. And then you try to refute the model with some sort of regression analysis. . . . My problem with this view is that it doesn’t reflect the way macro and finance actually work. Instead the models are
4 0.96600056 633 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-28-“The New Tyranny: Carbon Monoxide Detectors?”
Introduction: This story reminds me that, when I was in grad school, the state of Massachusetts instituted a seat-belt law which became a big controversy. A local talk show host made it his pet project to shoot down the law, and he succeeded! There was a ballot initiative and the voters repealed the seat belt law. A few years later the law returned (it was somehow tied in with Federal highway funding, I think, the same way they managed to get all the states to up the drinking age to 21), and, oddly enough, nobody seemed to care the second time around. It’s funny how something can be a big political issue one year and nothing the next. I have no deep insights on the matter, but it’s worth remembering that these sorts of panics are nothing new. Recall E.S. Turner’s classic book, Roads to Ruin. I think there’s a research project in here, to understand what gets an issue to be a big deal and how it is that some controversies just fade away.
Introduction: While visiting the education school at the University of Pennsylvania a couple months ago, I had a long conversation with Bob Boruch, a prominent researcher in the field of evidence-based education. We shared Fred Mosteller stories and talked about a lot of other things too. Boruch sent me an article about teaching randomized controlled trials to education students, which gave me the following idea which connects to my longstanding embarrassment (and subject of my next column on ethics, forthcoming in Chance magazine) about the lack of systematic measurement, sampling, or experimentation in our own teaching efforts. Anyway, here’s my idea for experimentation in statistics teaching, an idea that I think could work particularly well in classes with education students. Each class could, as part of the course, design an educational experiment to be performed on next year’s class. Easier said than done, I know, but perhaps ed school students would be particularly motivated to do t
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