andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-161 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Here’s a pretty funny example of silly statistics, caught by Lisa Wade : A study published in 2001 . . . asked undergraduate college students their favorite color and presented the results by sex. Men’s favorites are on the left, women’s on the right: The authors of the study, Lee Ellis and Christopher Ficek, wrote: We are inclined to suspect the involvement of neurohormonal factors. Studies of rats have found average sex differences in the number of neurons comprising various parts of the visual cortex. Also, gender differences have been found in rat preferences for the amount of sweetness in drinking water. One experiment demonstrated that the sex differences in rat preferences for sweetness was eliminated by depriving males of male-typical testosterone levels in utero. Perhaps, prenatal exposure to testosterone and other sex hormones operates in a similar way to “bias” preferences for certain colors in humans. As Wade points out, that all seems a bit ridiculous giv
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1 Here’s a pretty funny example of silly statistics, caught by Lisa Wade : A study published in 2001 . [sent-1, score-0.404]
2 asked undergraduate college students their favorite color and presented the results by sex. [sent-4, score-0.443]
3 Men’s favorites are on the left, women’s on the right: The authors of the study, Lee Ellis and Christopher Ficek, wrote: We are inclined to suspect the involvement of neurohormonal factors. [sent-5, score-0.298]
4 Studies of rats have found average sex differences in the number of neurons comprising various parts of the visual cortex. [sent-6, score-0.935]
5 Also, gender differences have been found in rat preferences for the amount of sweetness in drinking water. [sent-7, score-1.192]
6 One experiment demonstrated that the sex differences in rat preferences for sweetness was eliminated by depriving males of male-typical testosterone levels in utero. [sent-8, score-1.852]
7 Perhaps, prenatal exposure to testosterone and other sex hormones operates in a similar way to “bias” preferences for certain colors in humans. [sent-9, score-1.279]
8 As Wade points out, that all seems a bit ridiculous given some much more direct stories based on the big-time association of pink and blue with girls and boys. [sent-10, score-0.331]
9 No big deal, it’s just sort of funny to see this sort of pseudoscientific explanation in such pure form. [sent-11, score-0.344]
10 And what kind of person lists green as their favorite color? [sent-12, score-0.39]
11 I guess it’s like 538: the commenters just start arguing with each other. [sent-22, score-0.072]
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Introduction: Here’s a pretty funny example of silly statistics, caught by Lisa Wade : A study published in 2001 . . . asked undergraduate college students their favorite color and presented the results by sex. Men’s favorites are on the left, women’s on the right: The authors of the study, Lee Ellis and Christopher Ficek, wrote: We are inclined to suspect the involvement of neurohormonal factors. Studies of rats have found average sex differences in the number of neurons comprising various parts of the visual cortex. Also, gender differences have been found in rat preferences for the amount of sweetness in drinking water. One experiment demonstrated that the sex differences in rat preferences for sweetness was eliminated by depriving males of male-typical testosterone levels in utero. Perhaps, prenatal exposure to testosterone and other sex hormones operates in a similar way to “bias” preferences for certain colors in humans. As Wade points out, that all seems a bit ridiculous giv
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Introduction: Blogger Echidne pointed me to a recent article , “The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality,” by Marco Del Giudice, Tom Booth, and Paul Irwing, who find: Sex differences in personality are believed to be comparatively small. However, research in this area has suffered from significant methodological limitations. We advance a set of guidelines for overcoming those limitations: (a) measure personality with a higher resolution than that afforded by the Big Five; (b) estimate sex differences on latent factors; and (c) assess global sex differences with multivariate effect sizes. . . . We found a global effect size D = 2.71, corresponding to an overlap of only 10% between the male and female distributions. Even excluding the factor showing the largest univariate ES [effect size], the global effect size was D = 1.71 (24% overlap). Echidne quotes a news article in which one of the study’s authors going overboard: “Psychologically, men a
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Introduction: The paradox of racism is that at any given moment, the racism of the day seems reasonable and very possibly true, but the racism of the past always seems so ridiculous. I’ve been thinking about this for a few months ever since receiving in the mail a new book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History,” by New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade. Here’s what I wrote in my review of this book for Slate : The word “inequality” does not appear in the book’s index, but what Wade is offering is essentially a theory of economic and social inequality, explaining systematic racial differences in prosperity based on a combination of innate traits (“the disinclination to save in tribal societies is linked to a strong propensity for immediate consumption”) and genetic adaptation to political and social institutions (arguing, for example, that generations of centralized rule have effected a selection pressure for Chinese to be accepting of authority). Wade is clearly in
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Introduction: That cute picture is of toddler FDR in a dress, from 1884. Jeanne Maglaty writes : A Ladies’ Home Journal article [or maybe from a different source, according to a commenter] in June 1918 said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti. In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago. Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s . . . When the women’s liberation movement arrived in the mid-1960s, w
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Introduction: Paul Alper writes: For years I [Alper] have been obsessed by the color of the line which divides oncoming (i.e., opposing) traffic because I was firmly convinced that the color of the center line changed during my lifetime. Yet, I never could find anyone who had the same remembrance (or interest in the topic). The other day I found this this explanation that vindicates my recollection (and I was continuously out of the U.S. from 1969 to 1973): The question of which color to use for highway center lines in the United States enjoyed considerable debate and changing standards over a period of several decades. By November 1954, 47 states had adopted white as their standard color for highway centerlines, with Oregon being the last holdout to use yellow. In 1958, the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads adopted white as the standard color for the new interstate highway system. The 1971 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, however, mandated yellow as the standard color o
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Introduction: Here’s a pretty funny example of silly statistics, caught by Lisa Wade : A study published in 2001 . . . asked undergraduate college students their favorite color and presented the results by sex. Men’s favorites are on the left, women’s on the right: The authors of the study, Lee Ellis and Christopher Ficek, wrote: We are inclined to suspect the involvement of neurohormonal factors. Studies of rats have found average sex differences in the number of neurons comprising various parts of the visual cortex. Also, gender differences have been found in rat preferences for the amount of sweetness in drinking water. One experiment demonstrated that the sex differences in rat preferences for sweetness was eliminated by depriving males of male-typical testosterone levels in utero. Perhaps, prenatal exposure to testosterone and other sex hormones operates in a similar way to “bias” preferences for certain colors in humans. As Wade points out, that all seems a bit ridiculous giv
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Introduction: Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson writes : Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I
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Introduction: Dan Kahan sends in this horror story: A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers. “It’s pretty remarkable,” said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher? The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the athe
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Introduction: “Even as you get near the upper reaches of the normal weight range, you begin to see increases in chronic diseases,” said JoAnn Manson, chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, HMS Michael and Lee Bell Professor of Women’s Health, and HSPH professor of epidemiology. “It’s a clear gradient of increase.” Yeah, she would say that. Thin people. And then there’s Frank Hu, professor of nutrition at Harvard: The studies that Flegal [the author of the original study finding a negative correlation between body mass index and mortality] did use included many samples of people who were chronically ill, current smokers and elderly, according to Hu. These factors are associated with weight loss and increased mortality. In other words, people are not dying because they are slim, he said. They are slim because they are dying—of cancer or old age, for example. By doing a meta-analysis of studies that did not properly control for this bias, Flegal amplif
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Introduction: Awhile ago I was cleaning out the closet and found some old unread magazines. Good stuff. As we’ve discussed before , lots of things are better read a few years late. Today I was reading the 18 Nov 2004 issue of the London Review of Books, which contained (among other things) the following: - A review by Jenny Diski of a biography of Stanley Milgram. Diski appears to want to debunk: Milgram was a whiz at devising sexy experiments, but barely interested in any theoretical basis for them. They all have the same instant attractiveness of style, and then an underlying emptiness. Huh? Michael Jordan couldn’t hit the curveball and he was reportedly an easy mark for golf hustlers but that doesn’t diminish his greatness on the basketball court. She also criticizes Milgram for being “no help at all” for solving international disputes. OK, fine. I haven’t solved any international disputes either. Milgram, though, . . . he conducted an imaginative experiment whose results stu
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Introduction: From two years ago : Awhile ago I was cleaning out the closet and found some old unread magazines. Good stuff. As we’ve discussed before , lots of things are better read a few years late. Today I was reading the 18 Nov 2004 issue of the London Review of Books, which contained (among other things) the following: - A review by Jenny Diski of a biography of Stanley Milgram. Diski appears to want to debunk: Milgram was a whiz at devising sexy experiments, but barely interested in any theoretical basis for them. They all have the same instant attractiveness of style, and then an underlying emptiness. Huh? Michael Jordan couldn’t hit the curveball and he was reportedly an easy mark for golf hustlers but that doesn’t diminish his greatness on the basketball court. She also criticizes Milgram for being “no help at all” for solving international disputes. OK, fine. I haven’t solved any international disputes either. Milgram, though, . . . he conducted an imaginative exp
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Introduction: Eytan Adar writes: I was just going through the latest draft of your paper with Anthony Unwin . I heard part of it at the talk you gave (remotely) here at UMich. I’m curious about your discussion of the Baby Name Voyager . The tool in itself is simple, attractive, and useful. No argument from me there. It’s an awesome demonstration of how subtle interactions can be very helpful (click and it zooms, type and it filters… falls perfectly into the Shneiderman visualization mantra). It satisfies a very common use case: finding appropriate names for children. That said, I can’t help but feeling that what you are really excited about is the very static analysis on last letters (you spend most of your time on this). This analysis, incidentally, is not possible to infer from the interactive application (which doesn’t support this type of filtering and pivoting). In a sense, the two visualizations don’t have anything to do with each other (other than a shared context/dataset).
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Introduction: Check out comment #9 here . All we need is for Steven Levitt, David Runciman, and some Reader in Management somewhere to weigh in and we’ll be all set.
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