andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-232 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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
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1 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. [sent-1, score-1.651]
2 It is a false feeling of power, borrowed power from one’s country of origin rather than from one’s personal achievements. [sent-2, score-0.829]
3 I’d hardly think this needs to be explained, but here goes: 1. [sent-4, score-0.13]
4 Diplomats may feel the duty to serve their country, which is not the same as “enjoying” it. [sent-5, score-0.339]
5 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. [sent-6, score-0.41]
6 Some diplomats are very accomplished individuals, and that is why they are chosen to represent their country. [sent-8, score-0.646]
7 Consider an analogy: Yes, Tyler Cowen borrows some power from George Mason University. [sent-9, score-0.488]
8 But it goes the other way too: GMU borrows power from TC. [sent-10, score-0.584]
9 Beyond all this, and returning to more selfish goals, being a diplomat can be fun–you get to live in a foreign country without having to pay any rent. [sent-11, score-0.902]
10 Anyway, I’m surprised to see Cowen be so cynical about this, to assume that someone who does a difficult job must be doing so because he or she “enjoys” it. [sent-12, score-0.175]
11 I’m excluding the tautological definition of enjoyment in which everyone “enjoys” everything they do by definition, or else they wouldn’t do it. [sent-15, score-0.561]
12 I’m pretty sure Cowen is using “enjoy” to refer to actual enjoyment. [sent-16, score-0.072]
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same-blog 1 1.0 232 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
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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.
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Introduction: Alban Zeber writes: Suppose I have survey data from say 10 countries where by each country collected the data based on different sampling routines – the results of this being that each country has its own weights for the data that can be used in the analyses. If I analyse the data of each country separately then I can incorporate the survey design in the analyses e.g in Stata once can use svyset ….. But what happens when I want to do a pooled analysis of the all the data from the 10 countries: Presumably either 1. I analyse the data from each country separately (using multiple or logistic regression, …) accounting for the survey design and then combine the estimates using a meta analysis (fixed or random) OR 2. Assume that the data from each country is a simple random sample from the population, combine the data from the 10 countries and then use multilevel or hierarchical models My question is which of the methods is likely to give better estimates? Or is the
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Introduction: This was an good idea: take a bunch of old (and some recent) news articles on developments in mathematics and related ares from the past hundred years. Fun for the math content and historical/nostalgia value. Relive the four-color theorem, Fermat, fractals, and early computing. I have too much of a technical bent to be the ideal reader for this sort of book, but it seems like an excellent gift for a non-technical reader who nonetheless enjoys math. (I assume that such people are out there, just as there are people like me who can’t read music but still enjoy reading about the subject.) The book is organized by topic. My own preference would have been chronological and with more old stuff. I particularly enjoyed the material from many decades ago, such as the news report on one of the early computers. This must have been a fun book to compile.
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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
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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
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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
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . . . Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. . . . When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route—always, I’m ethical—but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove . . . In the end, experts they consider themselves to be, people are a tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses. I take a lot of rides to and from the airport, and I can assure you that a lot of taxi drivers don’t know the good routes. Once I had to start screaming from the back seat to stop the guy from getting on the BQE. I don’t “pride myself” on knowing a good route home from the airport, but I prefer the good route. I’m guessing that the taxi driver quoted above is subject to the same illusions
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Introduction: Jeff Ratto points me to this news article by Dean Baker reporting the work of three economists, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin, who found errors in a much-cited article by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff analyzing historical statistics of economic growth and public debt. Mike Konczal provides a clear summary; that’s where I got the above image. Errors in data processing and data analysis It turns out that Reinhart and Rogoff flubbed it. Herndon et al. write of “spreadsheet errors, omission of available data, weighting, and transcription.” The spreadsheet errors are the most embarrassing, but the other choices in data analysis seem pretty bad too. It can be tough to work with small datasets, so I have sympathy for Reinhart and Rogoff, but it does look like they were jumping to conclusions in their paper. Perhaps the urgency of the topic moved them to publish as fast as possible rather than carefully considering the impact of their data-analytic choi
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