andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-239 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I was sent a copy of “Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present,” by George Szpiro. It’s an interesting book that I think a lot of people will like, going over a bunch of voting paradoxes in the context of historical stories. Some of the topics (Arrow’s theorem and its recent refinements) are more interesting than others (the always nauseatingly boring (to me) of the “Alabama paradox” and various rules about which states get one extra House seat; for some reason people are always writing about this topic about which I could care less). But you can pick and choose among the chapters, so unevenness isn’t really such a problem. One thing that fascinates me about the topic of mathematics and representation is how many different ways there are to look at it. In 2002, I published a paper in Chance called Voting, Fairness, and Political Representation ( here’s a preprint version ; it later appeared, slightly revised, as a chapter in our Quantita
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1 It’s an interesting book that I think a lot of people will like, going over a bunch of voting paradoxes in the context of historical stories. [sent-2, score-0.319]
2 One thing that fascinates me about the topic of mathematics and representation is how many different ways there are to look at it. [sent-5, score-0.564]
3 And somebody else could probably write another article on the same topic with zero overlap with both of ours. [sent-7, score-0.484]
4 My article on voting and fairness grew out of a talk I gave in 2000 to the Lifelong Learners, a program at Columbia where retired people can come and hear university lectures. [sent-8, score-0.763]
5 The audience was just great–much better than any college class I’ve taught. [sent-9, score-0.13]
6 They asked lots of good questions and offered thoughtful comments. [sent-10, score-0.153]
7 at one point I offhandedly used the old joke, “How much is a congressman worth? [sent-14, score-0.524]
8 ” To which a lady in the audience stood up and said that her late husband had been a congressman for 20 years and had served with honor, and she didn’t appreciate that sort of remark. [sent-16, score-0.784]
9 Then later in the talk, I offhandedly referred to some districts as so partisan that they’d vote for a dead guy if he was running on the Democratic ticket. [sent-18, score-0.725]
10 I couldn’t believe I said that, and I was afraid to look at the woman who’d spoken up earlier. [sent-22, score-0.265]
11 I just hope she didn’t take that remark the wrong way. [sent-23, score-0.076]
12 We’re so used to joking about the things we work on, day after day, that sometimes we don’t catch what we’re saying. [sent-24, score-0.197]
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Introduction: I think I can best do my civic duty by running this one every Election Day, just like Art Buchwald on Thanksgiving. . . . With a national election coming up, and with the publicity at its maximum, now is a good time to ask, is it rational for you to vote? And, by extension, wass it worth your while to pay attention to whatever the candidates and party leaders have been saying for the year or so? With a chance of casting a decisive vote that is comparable to the chance of winning the lottery, what is the gain from being a good citizen and casting your vote? The short answer is, quite a lot. First the bad news. With 100 million voters, your chance that your vote will be decisive–even if the national election is predicted to be reasonably close–is, at best, 1 in a million in a battleground district and much less in a noncompetitive district such as where I live. (The calculation is based on the chance that your district’s vote will be exactly tied, along with the chance that you
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