andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-168 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Faithful readers will know that my ideal alternative career is to be an editor in the Max Perkins mold. If not that, I think I’d enjoy being a literary essayist, someone like Alfred Kazin or Edmund Wilson or Louis Menand, who could write about my favorite authors and books in a forum where others would read and discuss what I wrote. I could occasionally collect my articles into books, and so on. On the other hand, if I actually had such a career, I wouldn’t have much of an option to do statistical research in my spare time, so I think for my own broader goals, I’ve gotten hold of the right side of the stick. As it is, I enjoy writing about literary matters but it never quite seems worth spending the time to do it right. (And, stepping outside myself, I realize that I have a lot more to offer the world as a statistician than literary critic. Criticism is like musicianship–it can be hard to do, and it’s impressive when done well, but a lot of people can do it. Literary criticism
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Faithful readers will know that my ideal alternative career is to be an editor in the Max Perkins mold. [sent-1, score-0.069]
2 If not that, I think I’d enjoy being a literary essayist, someone like Alfred Kazin or Edmund Wilson or Louis Menand, who could write about my favorite authors and books in a forum where others would read and discuss what I wrote. [sent-2, score-0.379]
3 As it is, I enjoy writing about literary matters but it never quite seems worth spending the time to do it right. [sent-5, score-0.277]
4 (And, stepping outside myself, I realize that I have a lot more to offer the world as a statistician than literary critic. [sent-6, score-0.352]
5 The supply of qualified critics vastly exceeds demand. [sent-9, score-0.104]
6 Nobody is going to pay me $x/hour to be a literary consultant (for good reason, I’m sure), for any positive value of x. [sent-10, score-0.26]
7 Anyway, this is all preamble to a comment on Clive James, who I just love–yes, I realize this marks me as a middlebrow American Anglophile. [sent-12, score-0.266]
8 In any case, I came across this footnote in his verse collection: Noam Chomsky gave furiously sleep ideas green colorless as an example of a random sequence of words which could have no meaning. [sent-14, score-1.688]
9 So, to straighten things out: This is not quite correct. [sent-20, score-0.065]
10 He got the phrase backward: It’s “colorless green ideas sleep furiously. [sent-22, score-0.825]
11 ” Chomsky used two examples: “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” and “furiously sleep ideas green colorless. [sent-23, score-1.508]
12 ” The former set of words sounds like a sentence (even though it makes no sense), the latter does not sound like a sentence (and also does not make sense). [sent-24, score-0.776]
13 It’s a very deliberate sequence of words, the reverse of a prhase that make perfect grammatical (or syntactic, I can never get these straight) sense. [sent-27, score-0.261]
14 To use an analogy that James must be familiar with, “colorless green ideas” is like Jabberwocky–it sounds like English–all the parts of speech are in the right place. [sent-28, score-0.452]
15 The difference, what makes the Chomsky sentence special, is that, first, the sentence makes no sense. [sent-29, score-0.518]
16 But, beyond that, any two successive words of the sentence make no sense: Something green cannot be colorless, an idea cannot be green, ideas do not sleep, and you cannot sleep furiously. [sent-30, score-1.175]
17 Chomsky’s sentence is a work of beauty, and it was disappointing to see Clive James miss the point partly miss this point–in a book of poetry, no less! [sent-31, score-0.432]
18 Thanks to commenters for pointing out that my original blog was mistaken: Chomsky actually had two strings of words, not just one. [sent-38, score-0.065]
19 So James did not get the phrase wrong (although he was in error in calling it “random”). [sent-40, score-0.071]
20 Yes, I realize that James is originally from Australia. [sent-44, score-0.092]
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Introduction: Faithful readers will know that my ideal alternative career is to be an editor in the Max Perkins mold. If not that, I think I’d enjoy being a literary essayist, someone like Alfred Kazin or Edmund Wilson or Louis Menand, who could write about my favorite authors and books in a forum where others would read and discuss what I wrote. I could occasionally collect my articles into books, and so on. On the other hand, if I actually had such a career, I wouldn’t have much of an option to do statistical research in my spare time, so I think for my own broader goals, I’ve gotten hold of the right side of the stick. As it is, I enjoy writing about literary matters but it never quite seems worth spending the time to do it right. (And, stepping outside myself, I realize that I have a lot more to offer the world as a statistician than literary critic. Criticism is like musicianship–it can be hard to do, and it’s impressive when done well, but a lot of people can do it. Literary criticism
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Introduction: Noam Chomsky elicits a lot of emotional reactions. I’ve talked with some linguists who think Chomsky’s been a real roadblock to research in recent decades. Other linguists love Chomsky, but I think they’re the kind of linguists I wouldn’t spend much time talking with. Many people admire Chomsky’s political activism, but sociologist blogger Fabio Rojas distinguishes “the Chomsky’s of the world who sit around and speechify about the man” from the good guys, “the academics whose work leads to tangible improvements.” When Thomas Basbøll sent me this note, I [Basbøll] wonder if you react in the same (sympathetic) way to these remarks by Chomsky [text here ] as I do. I think he’s right that something happens to research when “applications” come into view. I like his distinction between two conceptions of science, one of which is based on “big data” in which patterns are found by brute information processing, and the other which requires the construction of simple, elegant models
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Introduction: The other day, a friend told me that when he saw me blogging on Noam Chomsky, he was surprised not to see any mention of disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser. I was like, whaaaaaa? I had no idea these two had any connection. In fact, though, they wrote papers together. This made me wonder what Chomsky thought of Hauser’s data scandal. I googled *marc hauser noam chomsky* and the first item that came up was this, from July 2011, reported by Tom Bartlett: I [Bartlett] asked Chomsky for his comment on the Hauser resignation and he e-mailed the following: Mark Hauser is a fine scientist with an outstanding record of accomplishment. His resignation is a serious loss for Harvard, and given the nature of the attack on him, for science generally. Chomsky is a mentor of Hauser so I can’t fault Chomsky for defending the guy. But why couldn’t he have stuck with something more general, something like, “I respect and admire Mark Hauser and am not aware of any improprieties in his w
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Introduction: Upon returning from sabbatical I came across a few magazines from a year ago that I hadn’t gotten around to reading. I’m thinking that I should read everything on a one-year delay. The too-topical stuff (for example, promos tied to upcoming movies) I can ignore, and other items are enhanced by knowing what happened a year or two later. For example, the 11 May 2009 issue of the New Yorker featured an article by Douglas McGray about an organization in Los Angeles called Green Dot that runs charter schools. According to the article, Green Dot, unlike typical charter school operators, educate just about everyone in their schools’ areas and so don’t benefit so much from selection . I don’t know enough about the details to evaluate these claims, but I was curious about this bit: [L.A. schools superintendent] Cortines has also agreed in principle to a partnership in Los Angeles. . . . Green Dot could take over as many as five Los Angeles schools in 2010, and maybe more. This mont
Introduction: Eric Tassone writes: Probably not blog-worthy/blog-appropriate, but have you heard Bill James discussing the Sandusky & Paterno stuff? I think you discussed once his stance on the Dowd Report, and this seems to be from the same part of his personality—which goes beyond contrarian . . . I have in fact blogged on James ( many times ) and on Paterno , so yes I think this is blogworthy. On the other hand, most readers of this blog probably don’t care about baseball, football, or William James, so I’ll put the rest below the fold. What is legendary baseball statistician Bill James doing, defending the crime-coverups of legendary coach Joe Paterno? As I wrote in my earlier blog on Paterno, it isn’t always easy to do the right thing, and I have no idea if I’d behave any better if I were in such a situation. The characteristics of a good coach do not necessarily provide what it takes to make good decisions off the field. In this sense even more of the blame should go
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Introduction: Faithful readers will know that my ideal alternative career is to be an editor in the Max Perkins mold. If not that, I think I’d enjoy being a literary essayist, someone like Alfred Kazin or Edmund Wilson or Louis Menand, who could write about my favorite authors and books in a forum where others would read and discuss what I wrote. I could occasionally collect my articles into books, and so on. On the other hand, if I actually had such a career, I wouldn’t have much of an option to do statistical research in my spare time, so I think for my own broader goals, I’ve gotten hold of the right side of the stick. As it is, I enjoy writing about literary matters but it never quite seems worth spending the time to do it right. (And, stepping outside myself, I realize that I have a lot more to offer the world as a statistician than literary critic. Criticism is like musicianship–it can be hard to do, and it’s impressive when done well, but a lot of people can do it. Literary criticism
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Introduction: In a review of the movie Moneyball, David Denby writes : Lewis, Miller, and the screenwriters may have gone too far in their gleeful celebration of Beane and their denigration of scouts. Beane has never made it to the World Series (in 2002, the A’s were eliminated in the playoffs by the Minnesota Twins). Oakland has had a mediocre record for the past five years, and it’s finishing a lousy season this year. Success in baseball remains something of a mystery (though pots of money continue to help the Yankees and the Sox). Sabermetrics is a fascinating approach to winning, but it’s one of many approaches, not the ultimate answer. It can’t explain why some teams with the right stats catch fire and others fade. In the movie, the scouts say some dumb stuff, but they know that statistics, no matter how they’re broken down, can’t predict everything. Denby generally likes the movie and is supportive of its message, so I shouldn’t really complain, but . . . the above passage is just s
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Introduction: Brett Keller points us to this feel-good story of the day: A Samurai sword-wielding Mormon bishop helped a neighbor woman escape a Tuesday morning attack by a man who had been stalking her. Kent Hendrix woke up Tuesday to his teenage son pounding on his bedroom door and telling him somebody was being mugged in front of their house. The 47-year-old father of six rushed out the door and grabbed the weapon closest to him — a 29-inch high carbon steel Samurai sword. . . . Hendrix, a pharmaceutical statistician, was one of several neighbors who came to the woman’s aid after she began yelling for help . . . Too bad the whole “statistician” thing got buried in the middle of the article. Fair enough, though: I don’t know what it takes to become a Mormon bishop, but I assume it’s more effort than what it takes to learn statistics.
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Introduction: Now that you have some free time again, you’ll have to check out these books and tell us if they’re worth reading. Claire Kirch reports : Lizzie Skurnick Books launches in September with the release of Debutante Hill by Lois Duncan. The novel, which was originally published by Dodd, Mead, in 1958, has been out of print for about three decades. The other books on the initial list, all reissues, are A Long Day in November by Ernest J. Gaines (originally published in 1971), Happy Endings Are All Alike by Sandra Scoppettone (1979), I’ll Love You When You’re More Like Me by M.E. Kerr (1977), Secret Lives by Berthe Amoss (1979), To All My Fans, With Love, From Sylvie by Ellen Conford (1982), and Me and Fat Glenda by Lila Perl (1972). . . . Noting that many of the books of that era beloved by teen boys are still in print – such as Isaac Asimov’s novels and The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier – Skurnick pointed out that, in contrast, many of the books that were embraced by teen gir
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Introduction: Alberto Cairo tells a fascinating story about John Snow, H. W. Acland, and the Mythmaking Problem: Every human community—nations, ethnic and cultural groups, professional guilds—inevitably raises a few of its members to the status of heroes and weaves myths around them. . . . The visual display of information is no stranger to heroes and myth. In fact, being a set of disciplines with a relatively small amount of practitioners and researchers, it has generated a staggering number of heroes, perhaps as a morale-enhancing mechanism. Most of us have heard of the wonders of William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas, Florence Nightingale’s coxcomb charts, Charles Joseph Minard’s Napoleon’s march diagram, and Henry Beck’s 1933 redesign of the London Underground map. . . . Cairo’s goal, I think, is not to disparage these great pioneers of graphics but rather to put their work in perspective, recognizing the work of their excellent contemporaries. I would like to echo Cairo’
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