andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-121 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Tyler Cowen hypothesizes a “dogmatism portfolio” or a “quota of dogmatism”: in his words, If you’re very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. OK, well “may be” is pretty vague. There’s not really anything to disagree with, yet. But then Cowen continues: There’s a lesson here. If you wish to be a more open-minded thinker, adhere to some extreme and perhaps unreasonable fandoms, the more firmly believed the better and the more obscure the area the better. This will help fulfill your dogmatism quota, yet without much skewing your more important beliefs. He seems to be making a testable prediction here, that levels of dogmatism on two randomly chosen issues should be negatively correlated. I guess I should call this “almost testable,” as it still requires an issue-by-issue measure of dogmatism. (Is it dogmatic to believe that there was this guy called Jesus who walked on water . . . or is it dogmatic to say that Jesus didn’t walk on water and
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Tyler Cowen hypothesizes a “dogmatism portfolio” or a “quota of dogmatism”: in his words, If you’re very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. [sent-1, score-0.772]
2 But then Cowen continues: There’s a lesson here. [sent-4, score-0.06]
3 If you wish to be a more open-minded thinker, adhere to some extreme and perhaps unreasonable fandoms, the more firmly believed the better and the more obscure the area the better. [sent-5, score-0.419]
4 This will help fulfill your dogmatism quota, yet without much skewing your more important beliefs. [sent-6, score-0.696]
5 He seems to be making a testable prediction here, that levels of dogmatism on two randomly chosen issues should be negatively correlated. [sent-7, score-1.076]
6 I guess I should call this “almost testable,” as it still requires an issue-by-issue measure of dogmatism. [sent-8, score-0.12]
7 (Is it dogmatic to believe that there was this guy called Jesus who walked on water . [sent-9, score-0.615]
8 or is it dogmatic to say that Jesus didn’t walk on water and that you’re right and 2 billion Christians are wrong? [sent-12, score-0.607]
9 ) In case you’re wondering, my guess is that, if you do manage to reasonably define “dogmatism” on a variety of issues, and if you do manage to measure these on a bunch of people, I suspect that dogmatism on different issues will be positively, not negatively correlated. [sent-14, score-1.233]
10 Yes, I realize that Cowen’s hypothesis fits various stories of people who were disillusioned by religion and transferred their allegiance to Communism, or ex-communists who found religion, etc etc etc. [sent-16, score-0.545]
11 Still, I’m gonna go with the psychometric principle taught to me many years ago by Don Rubin, which is that (almost) all test scores are positively correlated with each other . [sent-17, score-0.193]
12 I say this because he concludes the blog with the statement, “I believe in portfolio models of dogmatism very very strongly,” which, in combination of the above, suggests that he’s just holding this view in order to feel less dogmatic elsewhere. [sent-22, score-1.313]
13 I continue to be completely and utterly skeptical of his hypothesis. [sent-28, score-0.112]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('dogmatism', 0.629), ('dogmatic', 0.386), ('cowen', 0.299), ('quota', 0.148), ('portfolio', 0.143), ('testable', 0.135), ('jesus', 0.132), ('negatively', 0.129), ('positively', 0.122), ('water', 0.112), ('manage', 0.11), ('religion', 0.1), ('issues', 0.088), ('allegiance', 0.082), ('transferred', 0.082), ('disillusioned', 0.077), ('christians', 0.077), ('communism', 0.077), ('adhere', 0.074), ('firmly', 0.071), ('psychometric', 0.071), ('thinker', 0.071), ('area', 0.071), ('etc', 0.069), ('measure', 0.068), ('fulfill', 0.067), ('utterly', 0.067), ('hypothesis', 0.066), ('walked', 0.066), ('kidding', 0.061), ('lesson', 0.06), ('psychometrics', 0.059), ('unreasonable', 0.058), ('almost', 0.057), ('billion', 0.056), ('holding', 0.056), ('walk', 0.053), ('guess', 0.052), ('obscure', 0.052), ('believe', 0.051), ('wrong', 0.051), ('gon', 0.049), ('believed', 0.048), ('concludes', 0.048), ('chosen', 0.048), ('reasonably', 0.047), ('randomly', 0.047), ('na', 0.046), ('wish', 0.045), ('skeptical', 0.045)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000001 121 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-01-An (almost) testable assumption on dogmatism, and my guess of the answer, based on psychometric principles
Introduction: Tyler Cowen hypothesizes a “dogmatism portfolio” or a “quota of dogmatism”: in his words, If you’re very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. OK, well “may be” is pretty vague. There’s not really anything to disagree with, yet. But then Cowen continues: There’s a lesson here. If you wish to be a more open-minded thinker, adhere to some extreme and perhaps unreasonable fandoms, the more firmly believed the better and the more obscure the area the better. This will help fulfill your dogmatism quota, yet without much skewing your more important beliefs. He seems to be making a testable prediction here, that levels of dogmatism on two randomly chosen issues should be negatively correlated. I guess I should call this “almost testable,” as it still requires an issue-by-issue measure of dogmatism. (Is it dogmatic to believe that there was this guy called Jesus who walked on water . . . or is it dogmatic to say that Jesus didn’t walk on water and
2 0.167448 1994 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-22-“The comment section is open, but I’m not going to read them”
Introduction: That’s Tyler Cowen’s policy . I read almost all the comments here. I’m glad I read them, I think. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of interesting things from the comments. Sometimes, though, I wish I hadn’t bothered. Cowen gets about 10 times as many comments as I do, so I think in his case it makes sense to just ignore them. If he read (or, even worse, responded to) them, he’d have no time for anything else.
3 0.11732219 531 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-22-Third-party Dream Ticket
Introduction: Who are the only major politicians who are viewed more positively than negatively by the American public? (See page 3 of this report .)
4 0.1008433 743 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-03-An argument that can’t possibly make sense
Introduction: Tyler Cowen writes : Texas has begun to enforce [a law regarding parallel parking] only recently . . . Up until now, of course, there has been strong net mobility into the state of Texas, so was the previous lack of enforcement so bad? I care not at all about the direction in which people park their cars and I have no opinion on this law, but I have to raise an alarm at Cowen’s argument here. Let me strip it down to its basic form: 1. Until recently, state X had policy A. 2. Up until now, there has been strong net mobility into state X 3. Therefore, the presumption is that policy A is ok. In this particular case, I think we can safely assume that parallel parking regulations have had close to zero impact on the population flows into and out of Texas. More generally, I think logicians could poke some holes into the argument that 1 and 2 above imply 3. For one thing, you could apply this argument to any policy in any state that’s had positive net migration. Hai
5 0.095234729 232 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-25-Dodging the diplomats
Introduction: The usually-reasonable-even-if-you-disagree-with-him Tyler Cowen writes : Presumably diplomats either enjoy serving their country or they enjoy the ego rents of being a diplomat or both. It is a false feeling of power, borrowed power from one’s country of origin rather than from one’s personal achievements. Huh? I’d hardly think this needs to be explained, but here goes: 1. Diplomats may feel the duty to serve their country, which is not the same as “enjoying” it. Sometimes people take on jobs that are challenging and not well-paid because they feel that it is their duty to do their best at it. 2. Some diplomats are very accomplished individuals, and that is why they are chosen to represent their country. Consider an analogy: Yes, Tyler Cowen borrows some power from George Mason University. But it goes the other way too: GMU borrows power from TC. Beyond all this, and returning to more selfish goals, being a diplomat can be fun–you get to live in a foreign c
6 0.090291567 528 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-21-Elevator shame is a two-way street
7 0.083138898 238 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-27-No radon lobby
8 0.081607975 682 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-27-“The ultimate left-wing novel”
9 0.077831693 630 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-27-What is an economic “conspiracy theory”?
10 0.074604042 185 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-04-Why does anyone support private macroeconomic forecasts?
11 0.069431059 1587 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-21-Red state blue state, or, states and counties are not persons
12 0.069308378 495 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-31-“Threshold earners” and economic inequality
13 0.066152774 338 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-12-Update on Mankiw’s work incentives
14 0.066033818 1243 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-03-Don’t do the King’s Gambit
15 0.065723784 564 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-08-Different attitudes about parenting, possibly deriving from different attitudes about self
16 0.065653883 881 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-30-Rickey Henderson and Peter Angelos, together again
18 0.063684314 2263 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-24-Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models
19 0.062839434 2329 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-11-“What should you talk about?”
20 0.062380955 179 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-03-An Olympic size swimming pool full of lithium water
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.091), (1, -0.03), (2, 0.006), (3, 0.01), (4, -0.014), (5, -0.003), (6, 0.032), (7, 0.014), (8, 0.039), (9, -0.001), (10, -0.027), (11, 0.005), (12, -0.004), (13, -0.012), (14, 0.007), (15, 0.018), (16, -0.001), (17, -0.01), (18, 0.013), (19, -0.0), (20, 0.034), (21, -0.011), (22, -0.012), (23, 0.019), (24, -0.01), (25, -0.005), (26, 0.001), (27, 0.024), (28, 0.004), (29, 0.022), (30, 0.009), (31, -0.019), (32, 0.028), (33, -0.0), (34, 0.013), (35, -0.024), (36, 0.03), (37, 0.03), (38, 0.014), (39, -0.032), (40, -0.038), (41, -0.015), (42, -0.004), (43, -0.005), (44, -0.015), (45, -0.001), (46, -0.005), (47, -0.019), (48, -0.002), (49, -0.005)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.9611792 121 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-01-An (almost) testable assumption on dogmatism, and my guess of the answer, based on psychometric principles
Introduction: Tyler Cowen hypothesizes a “dogmatism portfolio” or a “quota of dogmatism”: in his words, If you’re very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. OK, well “may be” is pretty vague. There’s not really anything to disagree with, yet. But then Cowen continues: There’s a lesson here. If you wish to be a more open-minded thinker, adhere to some extreme and perhaps unreasonable fandoms, the more firmly believed the better and the more obscure the area the better. This will help fulfill your dogmatism quota, yet without much skewing your more important beliefs. He seems to be making a testable prediction here, that levels of dogmatism on two randomly chosen issues should be negatively correlated. I guess I should call this “almost testable,” as it still requires an issue-by-issue measure of dogmatism. (Is it dogmatic to believe that there was this guy called Jesus who walked on water . . . or is it dogmatic to say that Jesus didn’t walk on water and
2 0.77502632 743 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-03-An argument that can’t possibly make sense
Introduction: Tyler Cowen writes : Texas has begun to enforce [a law regarding parallel parking] only recently . . . Up until now, of course, there has been strong net mobility into the state of Texas, so was the previous lack of enforcement so bad? I care not at all about the direction in which people park their cars and I have no opinion on this law, but I have to raise an alarm at Cowen’s argument here. Let me strip it down to its basic form: 1. Until recently, state X had policy A. 2. Up until now, there has been strong net mobility into state X 3. Therefore, the presumption is that policy A is ok. In this particular case, I think we can safely assume that parallel parking regulations have had close to zero impact on the population flows into and out of Texas. More generally, I think logicians could poke some holes into the argument that 1 and 2 above imply 3. For one thing, you could apply this argument to any policy in any state that’s had positive net migration. Hai
3 0.75745285 1994 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-22-“The comment section is open, but I’m not going to read them”
Introduction: That’s Tyler Cowen’s policy . I read almost all the comments here. I’m glad I read them, I think. Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of interesting things from the comments. Sometimes, though, I wish I hadn’t bothered. Cowen gets about 10 times as many comments as I do, so I think in his case it makes sense to just ignore them. If he read (or, even worse, responded to) them, he’d have no time for anything else.
4 0.75743347 232 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-25-Dodging the diplomats
Introduction: The usually-reasonable-even-if-you-disagree-with-him Tyler Cowen writes : Presumably diplomats either enjoy serving their country or they enjoy the ego rents of being a diplomat or both. It is a false feeling of power, borrowed power from one’s country of origin rather than from one’s personal achievements. Huh? I’d hardly think this needs to be explained, but here goes: 1. Diplomats may feel the duty to serve their country, which is not the same as “enjoying” it. Sometimes people take on jobs that are challenging and not well-paid because they feel that it is their duty to do their best at it. 2. Some diplomats are very accomplished individuals, and that is why they are chosen to represent their country. Consider an analogy: Yes, Tyler Cowen borrows some power from George Mason University. But it goes the other way too: GMU borrows power from TC. Beyond all this, and returning to more selfish goals, being a diplomat can be fun–you get to live in a foreign c
5 0.75715464 2341 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-20-plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Introduction: This post is by Phil, and I’m writing about the slow pace of change in 21st-century America. [Note added later: at the time that I wrote this, I was unaware that a year-and-a-half ago Andrew had written a similar post on the theme. I suspect I, and perhaps most of this blog's readers, missed it because he posted it on New Year's Day]. [Note added later still: evidently I'm wrong and I did see Andrew's post, because I left a comment on it: " If you want to pick a 50-year period, with nice round numbers for the start and the end, my vote for the biggest lifestyle change for Americans is 1900-1950. Radio, telephone, television, indoor plumbing, refrigerators, home air conditioning, automobiles, airplanes… in the past 50 years all of those things have gotten better than they used to be (although I’m not sure there have been any major advances in indoor plumbing), but the change is small compared with having vs not having." And I was wrong about indoor plumbing, which most people di
8 0.72320169 1789 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-05-Elites have alcohol problems too!
9 0.72040725 1724 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-16-Zero Dark Thirty and Bayes’ theorem
10 0.71571773 1935 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-12-“A tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses”
11 0.71548355 1085 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-27-Laws as expressive
12 0.7148903 2053 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-06-Ideas that spread fast and slow
13 0.71133113 988 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-02-Roads, traffic, and the importance in decision analysis of carefully examining your goals
14 0.70598716 189 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-06-Proposal for a moratorium on the use of the words “fashionable” and “trendy”
15 0.70207518 487 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-27-Alfred Kahn
16 0.70204669 17 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-05-Taking philosophical arguments literally
17 0.70176733 229 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-24-Bizarre twisty argument about medical diagnostic tests
18 0.70151544 1037 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-01-Lamentably common misunderstanding of meritocracy
19 0.69823194 1410 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-09-Experimental work on market-based or non-market-based incentives
20 0.69788498 2158 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-03-Booze: Been There. Done That.
topicId topicWeight
[(16, 0.097), (19, 0.214), (21, 0.017), (22, 0.02), (24, 0.094), (28, 0.01), (36, 0.01), (43, 0.033), (52, 0.026), (53, 0.015), (61, 0.011), (63, 0.022), (81, 0.011), (86, 0.031), (88, 0.011), (90, 0.024), (98, 0.032), (99, 0.197)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.89163268 121 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-01-An (almost) testable assumption on dogmatism, and my guess of the answer, based on psychometric principles
Introduction: Tyler Cowen hypothesizes a “dogmatism portfolio” or a “quota of dogmatism”: in his words, If you’re very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. OK, well “may be” is pretty vague. There’s not really anything to disagree with, yet. But then Cowen continues: There’s a lesson here. If you wish to be a more open-minded thinker, adhere to some extreme and perhaps unreasonable fandoms, the more firmly believed the better and the more obscure the area the better. This will help fulfill your dogmatism quota, yet without much skewing your more important beliefs. He seems to be making a testable prediction here, that levels of dogmatism on two randomly chosen issues should be negatively correlated. I guess I should call this “almost testable,” as it still requires an issue-by-issue measure of dogmatism. (Is it dogmatic to believe that there was this guy called Jesus who walked on water . . . or is it dogmatic to say that Jesus didn’t walk on water and
2 0.80549467 1587 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-21-Red state blue state, or, states and counties are not persons
Introduction: Tyler Cowen points to this news article by Lauren Sandler: Stunningly, the postponement of marriage and parenting — the factors that shrink the birth rate — is the very best predictor of a person’s politics in the United States, over even income and education levels, a Belgian demographer named Ron Lesthaeghe [and coauthor Lisa Neidert] has discovered . Larger family size in America correlates to early marriage and childbirth, lower women’s employment, and opposition to gay rights — all social factors that lead voters to see red. All the analysis in the linked paper is at the state and county level. That’s fine but this is not going to tell you what is a “predictor of a person’s politics.” Cowen labels his post “Sentences to ponder,” and what I want to ponder is that people are so quick to jump from aggregate to individual patterns. And, yes, I know that aggregate patterns are related to individual patterns but they’re not the same. In particular, from the evidence we’
3 0.80436051 646 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Graphical insights into the safety of cycling.
Introduction: This article by Thomas Crag, at Copenhagenize, is marred by reliance on old data, but it’s so full of informative graphical displays — most of them not made by the author, I think — that it’s hard to pick just one. But here ya go. This figure shows fatalities (among cyclists) versus distance cycled, with a point for each year…unfortunately ending in way back in 1998, but still: This is a good alternative to the more common choice for this sort of plot, which would be overlaying curves of fatalities vs time and distance cycled vs time. The article also explicitly discusses the fact, previously discussed on this blog , that it’s misleading, to the point of being wrong in most contexts, to compare the safety of walking vs cycling vs driving by looking at the casualty or fatality rate per kilometer . Often, as in this article, the question of interest is something like, if more people switched from driving to cycling, how many more or fewer people would die? Obviously, if peo
4 0.80225199 1093 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-30-Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives
Introduction: Chris Paulse points me to this book by Ruth Grant: Incentives can be found everywhere–in schools, businesses, factories, and government–influencing people’s choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Ruth Grant shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and she identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses. Grant offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives
5 0.79042912 1444 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-05-Those darn conservative egalitarians
Introduction: Nadia Hassan writes: In your review of the Jacobs and Page book, you argued that while there was an open question of whether government could give voters what they wanted in light of the tax increases they might accept, Jacobs and Page were pretty persuasive about targeted tax hikes and specific programs especially against the freeloader view. Recent discussions, and some focus groups bear out these points exactly. The link is from a report by Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert. I suppose if you ask Doug Schoen to make up some data, you’ll get a different story.
6 0.7898643 765 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-How the ignorant idiots win, explained. Maybe.
8 0.78120208 805 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-16-Hey–here’s what you missed in the past 30 days!
9 0.77942532 1827 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-27-Continued fractions!!
10 0.77760959 468 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-15-Weakly informative priors and imprecise probabilities
11 0.77571285 732 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-26-What Do We Learn from Narrow Randomized Studies?
12 0.75026023 691 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-03-Psychology researchers discuss ESP
13 0.74932456 311 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-02-Where do our taxes go?
14 0.74544388 43 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-19-What do Tuesday’s elections tell us about November?
15 0.73798168 1988 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-19-BDA3 still (I hope) at 40% off! (and a link to one of my favorite papers)
16 0.73121369 15 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-03-Public Opinion on Health Care Reform
17 0.72970855 2204 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-09-Keli Liu and Xiao-Li Meng on Simpson’s paradox
18 0.72739041 481 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-22-The Jumpstart financial literacy survey and the different purposes of tests
19 0.72683966 579 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-18-What is this, a statistics class or a dentist’s office??
20 0.72682106 187 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-05-Update on state size and governors’ popularity