andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-69 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: After hearing a few times about the divorce predictions of researchers John Gottman and James Murray (work that was featured in Blink with a claim that they could predict with 83 percent accuracy whether a couple would be divorced–after meeting with them for 15 minutes) and feeling some skepticism , I decided to do the Lord’s work and amend Gottman’s wikipedia entry, which had a paragraph saying: Gottman found his methodology predicts with 90% accuracy which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later. It is also 81% percent accurate in predicting which marriages will survive after seven to nine years. I added the following: Gottman’s claim of 81% or 90% accuracy is misleading, however, because the accuracy is measured only after fitting a model to his data. There is no evidence that he can predict the outcome of a marriage with high accuracy in advance. As Laurie Abraham writes, “For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 It is also 81% percent accurate in predicting which marriages will survive after seven to nine years. [sent-2, score-0.215]
2 I added the following: Gottman’s claim of 81% or 90% accuracy is misleading, however, because the accuracy is measured only after fitting a model to his data. [sent-3, score-0.441]
3 There is no evidence that he can predict the outcome of a marriage with high accuracy in advance. [sent-4, score-0.245]
4 As Laurie Abraham writes, “For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57 newlywed couples . [sent-5, score-0.359]
5 He knew the marital status of his subjects at six years, and he fed that information into a computer along with the communication patterns turned up on the videos. [sent-8, score-0.198]
6 Then he asked the computer, in effect: Create an equation that maximizes the ability of my chosen variables to distinguish among the divorced, happy, and unhappy. [sent-9, score-0.168]
7 The next step, however–one absolutely required by the scientific method–is to apply your equation to a fresh sample to see whether it actually works. [sent-17, score-0.16]
8 That is especially necessary with small data slices (such as 57 couples), because patterns that appear important are more likely to be mere flukes. [sent-18, score-0.104]
9 Each paper he’s published heralding so-called predictions is based on a new equation created after the fact by a computer model. [sent-20, score-0.312]
10 Finally, on 21 May, my paragraph was completely removed by contributor Annsy5, who also wrote : Full disclosure: I [Annsy5] work for The Gottman Relationship Institute, which was co-founded by John Gottman, and we would like a change made to the Wikipedia entry on him. [sent-22, score-0.492]
11 The 3rd paragraph is made up largely of Laurie Abraham’s claims about Dr. [sent-23, score-0.263]
12 Abraham’s claims are inaccurate, and thorough citations can be found here: http://www. [sent-26, score-0.087]
13 We would like the paragraph removed, or at least moved to a section where the details of Dr. [sent-30, score-0.228]
14 I know that it would be a violation of the Conflict of Interest policy for me to just go in and make the changes, so I would like other editors’ input. [sent-32, score-0.24]
15 Please advise… I don’t know enough about Wikipedia to want to add my paragraph back in, but what’s going on here? [sent-35, score-0.176]
16 On 23:57, 20 May 2010, Annsy5 writes “I know that it would be a violation of the Conflict of Interest policy for me to just go in and make the changes,” and then on 23:13, 21 May 2010, Annsy5 goes and removes the paragraph and all references to criticisms of Gottman’s work. [sent-36, score-0.484]
17 But removing all criticism while leaving the disputed “90% accuracy” claim . [sent-39, score-0.163]
18 The reason is that I’m more interested in the wikipedia aspect of this than the marriage-counseling aspect, and I thought the blog entry might get some interesting discussion. [sent-46, score-0.31]
19 What does seem to be happening is that they get their claims out in the media and don’t have much motivation to tone down the sometimes overstated claims made on their behalf. [sent-48, score-0.174]
20 Whatever the detailed merits of Abraham’s criticisms, I thought it was uncool for them to be removed from the wikipedia pages: Her reporting is as legitimate as Gladwell’s. [sent-49, score-0.337]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('gottman', 0.697), ('abraham', 0.205), ('accuracy', 0.19), ('couples', 0.182), ('paragraph', 0.176), ('wikipedia', 0.159), ('removed', 0.119), ('newlywed', 0.118), ('equation', 0.112), ('divorce', 0.106), ('laurie', 0.103), ('divorced', 0.095), ('violation', 0.089), ('entry', 0.089), ('claims', 0.087), ('computer', 0.084), ('murray', 0.082), ('conflict', 0.072), ('criticisms', 0.064), ('aspect', 0.062), ('six', 0.061), ('claim', 0.061), ('accurate', 0.06), ('heralding', 0.059), ('uncool', 0.059), ('videotapes', 0.059), ('predictions', 0.057), ('amend', 0.056), ('blink', 0.056), ('contributor', 0.056), ('maximizes', 0.056), ('removes', 0.056), ('predict', 0.055), ('percent', 0.054), ('patterns', 0.053), ('additions', 0.053), ('criticism', 0.052), ('changes', 0.052), ('would', 0.052), ('bury', 0.051), ('lord', 0.051), ('marriages', 0.051), ('slices', 0.051), ('disputed', 0.05), ('survive', 0.05), ('fresh', 0.048), ('inaccurate', 0.047), ('rebuttal', 0.047), ('may', 0.047), ('policy', 0.047)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999982 69 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-04-A Wikipedia whitewash
Introduction: After hearing a few times about the divorce predictions of researchers John Gottman and James Murray (work that was featured in Blink with a claim that they could predict with 83 percent accuracy whether a couple would be divorced–after meeting with them for 15 minutes) and feeling some skepticism , I decided to do the Lord’s work and amend Gottman’s wikipedia entry, which had a paragraph saying: Gottman found his methodology predicts with 90% accuracy which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later. It is also 81% percent accurate in predicting which marriages will survive after seven to nine years. I added the following: Gottman’s claim of 81% or 90% accuracy is misleading, however, because the accuracy is measured only after fitting a model to his data. There is no evidence that he can predict the outcome of a marriage with high accuracy in advance. As Laurie Abraham writes, “For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57
Introduction: A few months ago, I blogged on John Gottman, a psychologist whose headline-grabbing research on marriages (he got himself featured in Blink with a claim that he could predict with 83 percent accuracy whether a couple would be divorced—after meeting with them for 15 minutes!) was recently debunked in a book by Laurie Abraham. The question I raised was: how could someone who was evidently so intelligent and accomplished—Gottman, that is—get things so wrong? My brief conclusion was that once you have some success, I guess there’s not much of a motivation to change your ways. Also, I could well believe that, for all its flaws, Gottman’s work is better than much of the other research out there on marriages. There’s still the question of how this stuff gets published in scientific journals. I haven’t looked at Gottman’s articles in detail and so don’t really have thoughts on that one. Anyway, I recently corresponded with a mathematician who had heard of Gottman’s research and wrote
Introduction: The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society publishes papers followed by discussions. Lots of discussions, each can be no more than 400 words. Here’s my most recent discussion: The authors are working on an important applied problem and I have no reason to doubt that their approach is a step forward beyond diagnostic criteria based on point estimation. An attempt at an accurate assessment of variation is important not just for statistical reasons but also because scientists have the duty to convey their uncertainty to the larger world. I am thinking, for example, of discredited claims such as that of the mathematician who claimed to predict divorces with 93% accuracy (Abraham, 2010). Regarding the paper at hand, I thought I would try an experiment in comment-writing. My usual practice is to read the graphs and then go back and clarify any questions through the text. So, very quickly: I would prefer Figure 1 to be displayed in terms of standard deviations, not variances. I
Introduction: I was given the opportunity to briefly comment on the paper , A Bayesian approach to complex clinical diagnoses: a case-study in child abuse, by Nicky Best, Deborah Ashby, Frank Dunstan, David Foreman, and Neil McIntosh, for the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Here is what I wrote: Best et al. are working on an important applied problem and I have no reason to doubt that their approach is a step forward beyond diagnostic criteria based on point estimation. An attempt at an accurate assessment of variation is important not just for statistical reasons but also because scientists have the duty to convey their uncertainty to the larger world. I am thinking, for example, of discredited claims such as that of the mathematician who claimed to predict divorces with 93% accuracy (Abraham, 2010). Regarding the paper at hand, I thought I would try an experiment in comment-writing. My usual practice is to read the graphs and then go back and clarify any questions through the t
Introduction: Etienne LeBel writes: You’ve probably already seen it, but I thought you could have a lot of fun with this one!! The article , with the admirably clear title given above, is by James McNulty, Michael Olson, Andrea Meltzer, Matthew Shaffer, and begins as follows: For decades, social psychological theories have posited that the automatic processes captured by implicit measures have implications for social outcomes. Yet few studies have demonstrated any long-term implications of automatic processes, and some scholars have begun to question the relevance and even the validity of these theories. At baseline of our longitudinal study, 135 newlywed couples (270 individuals) completed an explicit measure of their conscious attitudes toward their relationship and an implicit measure of their automatic attitudes toward their partner. They then reported their marital satisfaction every 6 months for the next 4 years. We found no correlation between spouses’ automatic and conscious attitu
6 0.097172223 1690 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-23-When are complicated models helpful in psychology research and when are they overkill?
7 0.096928611 640 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-31-Why Edit Wikipedia?
8 0.084297955 688 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-30-Why it’s so relaxing to think about social issues
9 0.079409637 1169 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-15-Charles Murray on the new upper class
10 0.076868489 2058 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-11-Gladwell and Chabris, David and Goliath, and science writing as stone soup
11 0.07548511 2177 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-19-“The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness”
12 0.067976773 1819 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-23-Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” and the measurement of social and political divisions
13 0.067880079 150 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Gaydar update: Additional research on estimating small fractions of the population
14 0.065753378 1026 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-25-Bayes wikipedia update
15 0.065630533 904 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-13-My wikipedia edit
16 0.062782153 229 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-24-Bizarre twisty argument about medical diagnostic tests
17 0.060753342 1482 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-04-Model checking and model understanding in machine learning
18 0.060524106 1836 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-02-Culture clash
19 0.060194414 612 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-14-Uh-oh
20 0.059028994 563 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-07-Evaluating predictions of political events
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.137), (1, -0.038), (2, 0.002), (3, -0.011), (4, 0.003), (5, -0.016), (6, 0.018), (7, -0.026), (8, 0.016), (9, 0.001), (10, -0.009), (11, 0.003), (12, -0.029), (13, -0.005), (14, -0.016), (15, 0.061), (16, 0.014), (17, 0.001), (18, 0.016), (19, 0.01), (20, -0.018), (21, 0.02), (22, -0.005), (23, -0.014), (24, 0.03), (25, 0.01), (26, -0.018), (27, 0.013), (28, 0.019), (29, -0.013), (30, 0.008), (31, 0.046), (32, 0.008), (33, 0.011), (34, -0.006), (35, -0.028), (36, 0.011), (37, -0.033), (38, 0.023), (39, -0.024), (40, 0.004), (41, 0.003), (42, 0.013), (43, -0.013), (44, -0.034), (45, -0.005), (46, -0.027), (47, -0.019), (48, 0.048), (49, 0.019)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.91775757 69 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-04-A Wikipedia whitewash
Introduction: After hearing a few times about the divorce predictions of researchers John Gottman and James Murray (work that was featured in Blink with a claim that they could predict with 83 percent accuracy whether a couple would be divorced–after meeting with them for 15 minutes) and feeling some skepticism , I decided to do the Lord’s work and amend Gottman’s wikipedia entry, which had a paragraph saying: Gottman found his methodology predicts with 90% accuracy which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later. It is also 81% percent accurate in predicting which marriages will survive after seven to nine years. I added the following: Gottman’s claim of 81% or 90% accuracy is misleading, however, because the accuracy is measured only after fitting a model to his data. There is no evidence that he can predict the outcome of a marriage with high accuracy in advance. As Laurie Abraham writes, “For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57
Introduction: A few months ago, I blogged on John Gottman, a psychologist whose headline-grabbing research on marriages (he got himself featured in Blink with a claim that he could predict with 83 percent accuracy whether a couple would be divorced—after meeting with them for 15 minutes!) was recently debunked in a book by Laurie Abraham. The question I raised was: how could someone who was evidently so intelligent and accomplished—Gottman, that is—get things so wrong? My brief conclusion was that once you have some success, I guess there’s not much of a motivation to change your ways. Also, I could well believe that, for all its flaws, Gottman’s work is better than much of the other research out there on marriages. There’s still the question of how this stuff gets published in scientific journals. I haven’t looked at Gottman’s articles in detail and so don’t really have thoughts on that one. Anyway, I recently corresponded with a mathematician who had heard of Gottman’s research and wrote
3 0.73017341 135 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-09-Rasmussen sez: “108% of Respondents Say . . .”
Introduction: The recent discussion of pollsters reminded me of a story from a couple years ago that perhaps is still relevant . . . I was looking up the governors’ popularity numbers on the web, and came across this page from Rasmussen Reports which shows Sarah Palin as the 3rd-most-popular governor. But then I looked more carefully. Janet Napolitano of Arizona was viewed as Excellent by 28% of respondents, Good by 27%, Fair by 26%, and Poor by 27%. That adds up to 108%! What’s going on? I’d think they would have a computer program to pipe the survey results directly into the spreadsheet. But I guess not, someone must be typing in these numbers one at a time. Another possibility is that they are altering their numbers by hand, and someone made a mistake with the Napolitano numbers, adding a few percent in one place and forgetting to subtract elsewhere. Or maybe there’s another explanation? P.S. Here are some thoughts from Mark Blumenthal P.P.S. I checked the Rasmussen link toda
4 0.71095675 1058 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-14-Higgs bozos: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are spinning in their graves
Introduction: David Hogg sends in this bizarre bit of news reporting by Robert Evans: Until now, in the four decades since it was first posited, no one has convincingly claimed to have glimpsed the Higgs Boson, let alone proved that it actually exists. At an eagerly awaited briefing on Tuesday at the CERN research centre near Geneva, two independent teams of “Higgs Hunters” – a term they themselves hate – were widely expected to suggest they were fairly confident they had spotted it. But not confident enough, in the physics world of ultra-precision where certainty has to be measured at nothing less than 100 percent, to announce “a discovery.” In the jargon, this level is described as 5 sigma . . . So far, so good. But then comes this doozy: As one scientist explained, that level of accuracy would equate to the 17th-century discoverer of gravity, Isaac Newton, sitting under his apple tree and a million apples one after another falling on his head without one missing. Huh? A free
5 0.7096743 563 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-07-Evaluating predictions of political events
Introduction: Mike Cohen writes: The recent events in Egypt raise an interesting statistical question. It is of course common for news stations like CNN to interview various officials and policy experts to find out what is likely to happen next. The obvious response of people like us is why ask such people when they didn’t foresee a month ago that these dynamic events were about to happen. One would instead like to hear from those experts that did predict that something was about to happen in Tunisia, and Egypt, and Jordan, and maybe Yemen, etc. Well, are there such people? My friend Bob Burton says that of course one can find such people in the sense that they made such predictions, but that is like finding counties that have voted for the President in the last five elections, big deal, or psychics that predicted the last assassination, again big deal. There is a good deal of truth in that. However, it seems like we do a little better. There are two points to make. First, there is an i
6 0.70682323 1603 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-03-Somebody listened to me!
7 0.70458841 1187 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-27-“Apple confronts the law of large numbers” . . . huh?
8 0.70305264 940 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-03-It depends upon what the meaning of the word “firm” is.
10 0.68289107 2166 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-10-3 years out of date on the whole Dennis the dentist thing!
11 0.68127209 893 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-06-Julian Symons on Frances Newman
12 0.67832863 2015 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-10-The ethics of lying, cheating, and stealing with data: A case study
13 0.67660296 2352 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-29-When you believe in things that you don’t understand
14 0.67588276 235 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-25-Term Limits for the Supreme Court?
15 0.67570972 360 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-21-Forensic bioinformatics, or, Don’t believe everything you read in the (scientific) papers
16 0.67400503 2280 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-03-As the boldest experiment in journalism history, you admit you made a mistake
17 0.67379022 945 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-06-W’man < W’pedia, again
19 0.67061847 137 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-10-Cost of communicating numbers
20 0.66899365 1657 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-06-Lee Nguyen Tran Kim Song Shimazaki
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.01), (15, 0.032), (16, 0.071), (21, 0.037), (24, 0.097), (34, 0.017), (45, 0.216), (63, 0.014), (68, 0.012), (86, 0.073), (87, 0.012), (95, 0.031), (96, 0.012), (99, 0.238)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.95206082 543 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-28-NYT shills for personal DNA tests
Introduction: Kaiser nails it . The offending article , by John Tierney, somehow ended up in the Science section rather than the Opinion section. As an opinion piece (or, for that matter, a blog), Tierney’s article would be nothing special. But I agree with Kaiser that it doesn’t work as a newspaper article. As Kaiser notes, this story involves a bunch of statistical and empirical claims that are not well resolved by P.R. and rhetoric.
2 0.94968027 999 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-09-I was at a meeting a couple months ago . . .
Introduction: . . . and I decided to amuse myself by writing down all the management-speak words I heard: “grappling” “early prototypes” “technology platform” “building block” “machine learning” “your team” “workspace” “tagging” “data exhaust” “monitoring a particular population” “collective intelligence” “communities of practice” “hackathon” “human resources . . . technologies” Any one or two or three of these phrases might be fine, but put them all together and what you have is a festival of jargon. A hackathon, indeed.
3 0.94819874 1407 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-06-Statistical inference and the secret ballot
Introduction: Ring Lardner, Jr.: [In 1936] I was already settled in Southern California, and it may have been that first exercise of the franchise that triggered the FBI surveillance of me that would last for decades. I had assumed, of course, that I was enjoying the vaunted American privilege of the secret ballot. On a wall outside my polling place on Wilshire Boulevard, however, was a compilation of the district’s registered voters: Democrats, a long list of names; Republicans, a somewhat lesser number; and “Declines to State,” one, “Ring W. Lardner, Jr.” The day after the election, alongside those lists were published the results: Roosevelt, so many; Landon, so many; Browder, one.
4 0.91457361 1325 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-17-More on the difficulty of “preaching what you practice”
Introduction: A couple months ago, in discussing Charles Murray’s argument that America’s social leaders should “preach what they practice” (Murray argues that they—we!—tend to lead good lives of hard work and moderation but are all too tolerant of antisocial and unproductive behavior among the lower classes), I wrote : Murray does not consider the case of Joe Paterno, but in many ways the Penn State football coach fits his story well. Paterno was said to live an exemplary personal and professional life, combining traditional morality with football success—but, by his actions, he showed little concern about the morality of his players and coaches. At a professional level, Paterno rose higher and higher, and in his personal life he was a responsible adult. But he had an increasing disconnect with the real world, to the extent that horrible crimes were occurring nearby (in the physical and social senses) but he was completely insulated from the consequences for many years. Paterno’s story is s
same-blog 5 0.91366208 69 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-04-A Wikipedia whitewash
Introduction: After hearing a few times about the divorce predictions of researchers John Gottman and James Murray (work that was featured in Blink with a claim that they could predict with 83 percent accuracy whether a couple would be divorced–after meeting with them for 15 minutes) and feeling some skepticism , I decided to do the Lord’s work and amend Gottman’s wikipedia entry, which had a paragraph saying: Gottman found his methodology predicts with 90% accuracy which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later. It is also 81% percent accurate in predicting which marriages will survive after seven to nine years. I added the following: Gottman’s claim of 81% or 90% accuracy is misleading, however, because the accuracy is measured only after fitting a model to his data. There is no evidence that he can predict the outcome of a marriage with high accuracy in advance. As Laurie Abraham writes, “For the 1998 study, which focused on videotapes of 57
6 0.90385258 791 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-08-Censoring on one end, “outliers” on the other, what can we do with the middle?
7 0.90328461 1031 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-27-Richard Stallman and John McCarthy
8 0.89161193 362 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-22-A redrawing of the Red-Blue map in November 2010?
9 0.89135391 310 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-02-The winner’s curse
10 0.88416541 192 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-08-Turning pages into data
11 0.88194501 1504 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-20-Could someone please lock this guy and Niall Ferguson in a room together?
12 0.88170439 673 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-20-Upper-income people still don’t realize they’re upper-income
13 0.88092375 206 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-13-Indiemapper makes thematic mapping easy
14 0.87172306 1012 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-16-Blog bribes!
15 0.86603874 1121 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-15-R-squared for multilevel models
16 0.86363375 2189 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-28-History is too important to be left to the history professors
17 0.85984182 1767 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-17-The disappearing or non-disappearing middle class
18 0.85565269 1658 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-07-Free advice from an academic writing coach!
19 0.85382825 1854 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-13-A Structural Comparison of Conspicuous Consumption in China and the United States
20 0.85002601 1089 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-28-Path sampling for models of varying dimension