andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-88 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Seth, a retired university professor who, during his employment at an elite school, spent a lot of time doing research with the goal of improving people’s lives, writes : Professors, especially at elite schools, dislike doing research with obvious value. It strikes them as menial. “Practical” and “applied” are terms of disparagement, whereas “pure” research (research without obvious value) is good. Given that Seth isn’t that way himself, I assume he’d say that this claim applies to “many” professors or “most” professors but surely not all? What I’ve noticed, though, is more the opposite, that even people who do extremely theoretical work like to feel that it is applied, practical, and useful. I think that, among other things, Seth is confusing what people want to do with what they actually can do . For example, he criticizes biologists for researching stem cells and prions rather than prevention of disease. But preventing diseases is difficult! That’s why the scientists
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Seth, a retired university professor who, during his employment at an elite school, spent a lot of time doing research with the goal of improving people’s lives, writes : Professors, especially at elite schools, dislike doing research with obvious value. [sent-1, score-1.365]
2 “Practical” and “applied” are terms of disparagement, whereas “pure” research (research without obvious value) is good. [sent-3, score-0.35]
3 Given that Seth isn’t that way himself, I assume he’d say that this claim applies to “many” professors or “most” professors but surely not all? [sent-4, score-1.007]
4 What I’ve noticed, though, is more the opposite, that even people who do extremely theoretical work like to feel that it is applied, practical, and useful. [sent-5, score-0.108]
5 I think that, among other things, Seth is confusing what people want to do with what they actually can do . [sent-6, score-0.303]
6 For example, he criticizes biologists for researching stem cells and prions rather than prevention of disease. [sent-7, score-0.652]
7 That’s why the scientists are doing research, because they don’t know how to cure diseases. [sent-9, score-0.1]
8 I guess because I’m impressed at the effort Seth has put into doing research that might end up directly changing people’s lives. [sent-11, score-0.384]
9 I agree that most professors don’t do this, even those of us in departments such as psychology or political science that might seem to have a lot of practical relevance. [sent-12, score-0.664]
10 But I think he’s making an old, old mistake by assuming that, just because people are not doing a certain thing, it’s because they don’t want to do it. [sent-13, score-0.317]
11 Similar to his earlier claim that people write badly on purpose. [sent-14, score-0.302]
12 Especially given that so many of the low-hanging research fruit have been plucked. [sent-16, score-0.349]
13 If you want to knock academic research for being useless, fine, but it seems to be (mistakenly) adding insult to injury to say that we’re all being useless on purpose! [sent-17, score-0.971]
14 If you accept that professors want to be useful and don’t always succeed, that’s much more interesting (and, I think, true) than stating that they’re being useless on purpose. [sent-18, score-0.818]
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Introduction: Seth, a retired university professor who, during his employment at an elite school, spent a lot of time doing research with the goal of improving people’s lives, writes : Professors, especially at elite schools, dislike doing research with obvious value. It strikes them as menial. “Practical” and “applied” are terms of disparagement, whereas “pure” research (research without obvious value) is good. Given that Seth isn’t that way himself, I assume he’d say that this claim applies to “many” professors or “most” professors but surely not all? What I’ve noticed, though, is more the opposite, that even people who do extremely theoretical work like to feel that it is applied, practical, and useful. I think that, among other things, Seth is confusing what people want to do with what they actually can do . For example, he criticizes biologists for researching stem cells and prions rather than prevention of disease. But preventing diseases is difficult! That’s why the scientists
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Introduction: I met Seth back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. He sometimes came to the statistics department seminar and we got to talking about various things; in particular we shared an interest in statistical graphics. Much of my work in this direction eventually went toward the use of graphical displays to understand fitted models. Seth went in another direction and got interested in the role of exploratory data analysis in science, the idea that we could use graphs not just to test or even understand a model but also as the source of new hypotheses. We continued to discuss these issues over the years; see here , for example. At some point when we were at Berkeley the administration was encouraging the faculty to teach freshman seminars, and I had the idea of teaching a course on left-handedness. I’d just read the book by Stanley Coren and thought it would be fun to go through it with a class, chapter by chapter. But my knowledge of psych
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Introduction: Seth, a retired university professor who, during his employment at an elite school, spent a lot of time doing research with the goal of improving people’s lives, writes : Professors, especially at elite schools, dislike doing research with obvious value. It strikes them as menial. “Practical” and “applied” are terms of disparagement, whereas “pure” research (research without obvious value) is good. Given that Seth isn’t that way himself, I assume he’d say that this claim applies to “many” professors or “most” professors but surely not all? What I’ve noticed, though, is more the opposite, that even people who do extremely theoretical work like to feel that it is applied, practical, and useful. I think that, among other things, Seth is confusing what people want to do with what they actually can do . For example, he criticizes biologists for researching stem cells and prions rather than prevention of disease. But preventing diseases is difficult! That’s why the scientists
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