andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-173 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Regarding editing : The only serious editing I’ve ever received has been for my New York Times op-eds and my article in the American Scientist. My book editors have all been nice people, and they’ve helped me with many things (including suggestions of what my priorities should be in communicating with readers)–they’ve been great–but they’ve not given (nor have I expected or asked for) serious editing. Maybe I should’ve asked for it, I don’t know. I’ve had time-wasting experiences with copy editors and a particularly annoying experience with a production editor (who was so difficult that my coauthors and I actually contacted our agent and a lawyer about the possibility of getting out of our contract), but that’s another story. Regarding clutch hitting , Bill James once noted that it’s great when a Bucky Dent hits an unexpected home run, but what’s really special is being able to get the big hit when it’s expected of you. The best players can do their best every time they come t
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Regarding editing : The only serious editing I’ve ever received has been for my New York Times op-eds and my article in the American Scientist. [sent-1, score-0.738]
2 My book editors have all been nice people, and they’ve helped me with many things (including suggestions of what my priorities should be in communicating with readers)–they’ve been great–but they’ve not given (nor have I expected or asked for) serious editing. [sent-2, score-1.199]
3 I’ve had time-wasting experiences with copy editors and a particularly annoying experience with a production editor (who was so difficult that my coauthors and I actually contacted our agent and a lawyer about the possibility of getting out of our contract), but that’s another story. [sent-4, score-1.583]
4 Regarding clutch hitting , Bill James once noted that it’s great when a Bucky Dent hits an unexpected home run, but what’s really special is being able to get the big hit when it’s expected of you. [sent-5, score-1.488]
5 The best players can do their best every time they come to the plate. [sent-6, score-0.302]
6 That’s why Bill James says that the lack of evidence for clutch hitting makes sense, it’s not a paradox at all: One characteristic of pros is that they can do it over and over. [sent-7, score-1.214]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 173 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-31-Editing and clutch hitting
Introduction: Regarding editing : The only serious editing I’ve ever received has been for my New York Times op-eds and my article in the American Scientist. My book editors have all been nice people, and they’ve helped me with many things (including suggestions of what my priorities should be in communicating with readers)–they’ve been great–but they’ve not given (nor have I expected or asked for) serious editing. Maybe I should’ve asked for it, I don’t know. I’ve had time-wasting experiences with copy editors and a particularly annoying experience with a production editor (who was so difficult that my coauthors and I actually contacted our agent and a lawyer about the possibility of getting out of our contract), but that’s another story. Regarding clutch hitting , Bill James once noted that it’s great when a Bucky Dent hits an unexpected home run, but what’s really special is being able to get the big hit when it’s expected of you. The best players can do their best every time they come t
2 0.28393313 1113 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-11-Toshiro Kageyama on professionalism
Introduction: Following up on our discussion of professionalism (in which Jonathan Chait argued that “the definition of a professional career track” requires pay differentials and the chance to get fired, and I argued the opposite, that a lot of people go into professional careers specifically because of the job security), Austin Frakt pointed me to this description of professionalism from Go master Toshiro Kageyama. This in turn reminds me of a remark of Bill James when he explained lack of surprise that clutch hitting does not show up in the data. He wrote that the underlying idea of clutch hitting is that a player will play particuarly well in an important situation where the game or the season is on the line. But, James pointed out, these guys are pros, and the true sign of a professional is that he can always stay concentrated. This argument applies particuarly for hitting, maybe less so for pitching, where a pitcher can’t necessarily throw his hardest for 100 pitches in a game.
Introduction: During our discussion of estimates of teacher performance, Steve Sailer wrote : I suspect we’re going to take years to work the kinks out of overall rating systems. By way of analogy, Bill James kicked off the modern era of baseball statistics analysis around 1975. But he stuck to doing smaller scale analyses and avoided trying to build one giant overall model for rating players. In contrast, other analysts such as Pete Palmer rushed into building overall ranking systems, such as his 1984 book, but they tended to generate curious results such as the greatness of Roy Smalley Jr.. James held off until 1999 before unveiling his win share model for overall rankings. I remember looking at Pete Palmer’s book many years ago and being disappointed that he did everything through his Linear Weights formula. A hit is worth X, a walk is worth Y, etc. Some of this is good–it’s presumably an improvement on counting walks as 0 or 1 hits, also an improvement on counting doubles and triples a
4 0.13801382 697 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-05-A statistician rereads Bill James
Introduction: Ben Lindbergh invited me to write an article for Baseball Prospectus. I first sent him this item on the differences between baseball and politics but he said it was too political for them. I then sent him this review of a book on baseball’s greatest fielders but he said they already had someone slotted to review that book. Then I sent him some reflections on the great Bill James and he published it ! If anybody out there knows Bill James, please send this on to him: I have some questions at the end that I’m curious about. Here’s how it begins: I read my first Bill James book in 1984, took my first statistics class in 1985, and began graduate study in statistics the next year. Besides giving me the opportunity to study with the best applied statistician of the late 20th century (Don Rubin) and the best theoretical statistician of the early 21st (Xiao-Li Meng), going to graduate school at Harvard in 1986 gave me the opportunity to sit in a basement room one evening that
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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18 0.078787319 855 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-16-Infovis and statgraphics update update
19 0.077595875 532 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-23-My Wall Street Journal story
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same-blog 1 0.95215052 173 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-31-Editing and clutch hitting
Introduction: Regarding editing : The only serious editing I’ve ever received has been for my New York Times op-eds and my article in the American Scientist. My book editors have all been nice people, and they’ve helped me with many things (including suggestions of what my priorities should be in communicating with readers)–they’ve been great–but they’ve not given (nor have I expected or asked for) serious editing. Maybe I should’ve asked for it, I don’t know. I’ve had time-wasting experiences with copy editors and a particularly annoying experience with a production editor (who was so difficult that my coauthors and I actually contacted our agent and a lawyer about the possibility of getting out of our contract), but that’s another story. Regarding clutch hitting , Bill James once noted that it’s great when a Bucky Dent hits an unexpected home run, but what’s really special is being able to get the big hit when it’s expected of you. The best players can do their best every time they come t
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: I was recently rereading and enjoying Bill James’s Historical Baseball Abstract (the second edition, from 2001). But even the Master is not perfect. Here he is, in the context of the all-time 20th-greatest shortstop (in his reckoning): Are athletes special people? In general, no, but occasionally, yes. Johnny Pesky at 75 was trim, youthful, optimistic, and practically exploding with energy. You rarely meet anybody like that who isn’t an ex-athlete–and that makes athletes seem special. [italics in the original] Hey, I’ve met 75-year-olds like that–and none of them are ex-athletes! That’s probably because I don’t know a lot of ex-athletes. But Bill James . . . he knows a lot of athletes. He went to the bathroom with Tim Raines once! The most I can say is that I saw Rickey Henderson steal a couple bases when he was playing against the Orioles once. Cognitive psychologists talk about the base-rate fallacy , which is the mistake of estimating probabilities without accou
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Introduction: From Dan Goldstein : Pretty good, but really the pie chart should be three-dimensional, shown at an angle, and with one or two of the slices popping out. P.S. They seemed to have placed a link for the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. That book’s ok, but what I was really recommending were his Abstracts from 1982-1986, which are something else entirely.
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Introduction: Daniel Drezner takes on Bill James.
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1 0.97308409 802 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-13-Super Sam Fuld Needs Your Help (with Foul Ball stats)
Introduction: I was pleasantly surprised to have my recreational reading about baseball in the New Yorker interrupted by a digression on statistics. Sam Fuld of the Tampa Bay Rays, was the subjet of a Ben McGrath profile in the 4 July 2011 issue of the New Yorker , in an article titled Super Sam . After quoting a minor-league trainer who described Fuld as “a bit of a geek” (who isn’t these days?), McGrath gets into that lovely New Yorker detail: One could have pointed out the more persuasive and telling examples, such as the fact that in 2005, after his first pro season, with the Class-A Peoria Chiefs, Fuld applied for a fall internship with Stats, Inc., the research firm that supplies broadcasters with much of the data anad analysis that you hear in sports telecasts. After a description of what they had him doing, reviewing footage of games and cataloguing, he said “I thought, They have a stat for everything, but they don’t have any stats regarding foul balls.” Fuld’s
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Introduction: Why can’t I buy train and plane tickets through Amazon? That would be so much more convenient than the current system where I have to keep entering information into the damn forms over and over again.
Introduction: Someone passed on to a message from his university library announcing that the journal “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” is no longer free. Librarians have to decide what to do, so I thought I’d offer the following consumer guide: Wiley Computational Statistics journal Wikipedia Frequency 6 issues per year Continuously updated Includes articles from Wikipedia? Yes Yes Cites the Wikipedia sources it uses? No Yes Edited by recipient of ASA Founders Award? Yes No Articles are subject to rigorous review? No Yes Errors, when discovered, get fixed? No Yes Number of vertices in n-dimensional hypercube? 2n 2 n Easy access to Brady Bunch trivia? No Yes Cost (North America) $1400-$2800 $0 Cost (UK) £986-£1972 £0 Cost (Europe) €1213-€2426 €0 The choice seems pretty clear to me! It’s funny for the Wiley journal to start charging now
4 0.91308463 347 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-17-Getting arm and lme4 running on the Mac
Introduction: Our “arm” package in R requires Doug Bates’s “lme4″ which fits multilevel models. lme4 is currently having some problems on the Mac. But installation on the Mac can be done; it just takes a bit of work. I have two sets of instructions below. From Yu-Sung: If you have MAC OS DVD, you should install developer X code packages from it. Otherwise, install them from here . After this, do the following in R: install.packages(“lme4″, type = “source”) Then you will have lme4 in R and you can install arm without a problem. And, from David Ozonoff: I installed the lme4 package via the Package Installer but this didn’t work, of course. I then installed, via this link , gfortran which seemed to put the libraries in the right place (I had earlier installed via Fink the gcc42 compiler, so I’m not sure if this is required or not). I then ran, in R, this: install.packages(c(“Matrix”,”lme4″), repos=”http://R-Forge.R-project.org”) This does not appear to work since it wi
same-blog 5 0.9066205 173 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-31-Editing and clutch hitting
Introduction: Regarding editing : The only serious editing I’ve ever received has been for my New York Times op-eds and my article in the American Scientist. My book editors have all been nice people, and they’ve helped me with many things (including suggestions of what my priorities should be in communicating with readers)–they’ve been great–but they’ve not given (nor have I expected or asked for) serious editing. Maybe I should’ve asked for it, I don’t know. I’ve had time-wasting experiences with copy editors and a particularly annoying experience with a production editor (who was so difficult that my coauthors and I actually contacted our agent and a lawyer about the possibility of getting out of our contract), but that’s another story. Regarding clutch hitting , Bill James once noted that it’s great when a Bucky Dent hits an unexpected home run, but what’s really special is being able to get the big hit when it’s expected of you. The best players can do their best every time they come t
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