andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-57 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I used to think that fiction is about making up stories, but in recent years I’ve decided that fiction is really more of a method of telling true stories. One thing fiction allows you to do is explore what-if scenarios. I recently read two books that made me think about this: The Counterlife by Philip Roth and Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam. Both books are explicitly about contingencies and possibilities: Roth’s tells a sequence of related but contradictory stories involving his Philip Roth-like (of course) protagonist, and Amsterdam’s is based on an alternative present/future. (I picture Amsterdam’s book as being set in Australia, but maybe I’m just imagining this based on my knowledge that the book was written and published in that country.) I found both books fascinating, partly because of the characters’ voices but especially because they both seemed to exemplify George Box’s dictum that to understand a system you have to perturb it. So, yes, literature an
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1 I used to think that fiction is about making up stories, but in recent years I’ve decided that fiction is really more of a method of telling true stories. [sent-1, score-1.073]
2 One thing fiction allows you to do is explore what-if scenarios. [sent-2, score-0.58]
3 I recently read two books that made me think about this: The Counterlife by Philip Roth and Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam. [sent-3, score-0.266]
4 Both books are explicitly about contingencies and possibilities: Roth’s tells a sequence of related but contradictory stories involving his Philip Roth-like (of course) protagonist, and Amsterdam’s is based on an alternative present/future. [sent-4, score-1.137]
5 (I picture Amsterdam’s book as being set in Australia, but maybe I’m just imagining this based on my knowledge that the book was written and published in that country. [sent-5, score-0.63]
6 ) I found both books fascinating, partly because of the characters’ voices but especially because they both seemed to exemplify George Box’s dictum that to understand a system you have to perturb it. [sent-6, score-0.998]
7 So, yes, literature and statistics are fundamentally intertwined (as Dick De Veaux has also said, but for slightly different reasons ). [sent-7, score-0.334]
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Introduction: I used to think that fiction is about making up stories, but in recent years I’ve decided that fiction is really more of a method of telling true stories. One thing fiction allows you to do is explore what-if scenarios. I recently read two books that made me think about this: The Counterlife by Philip Roth and Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam. Both books are explicitly about contingencies and possibilities: Roth’s tells a sequence of related but contradictory stories involving his Philip Roth-like (of course) protagonist, and Amsterdam’s is based on an alternative present/future. (I picture Amsterdam’s book as being set in Australia, but maybe I’m just imagining this based on my knowledge that the book was written and published in that country.) I found both books fascinating, partly because of the characters’ voices but especially because they both seemed to exemplify George Box’s dictum that to understand a system you have to perturb it. So, yes, literature an
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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.
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