andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-274 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Steven Hayward at the American Enterprise Institute wrote an article , sure to attract the attention of people such as myself, entitled, “The irrelevance of modern political science,” in which he discusses some silly-sounding papers presented at the recent American Political Science Association and then moves to a larger critique of quantitative political science: I [Hayward] have often taken a random article from the American Political Science Review, which resembles a mathematical journal on most of its pages, and asked students if they can envision this method providing the mathematical formula that will deliver peace in the Middle East. Even the dullest students usually grasp the point without difficulty. At the sister blog, John Sides discusses and dismisses Hayward’s arguments, point on that, among other things, political science might very well be useful even if it doesn’t deliver peace in the Middle East. After all, the U.S. Army didn’t deliver peace in the Midd
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1 Even the dullest students usually grasp the point without difficulty. [sent-2, score-0.215]
2 At the sister blog, John Sides discusses and dismisses Hayward’s arguments, point on that, among other things, political science might very well be useful even if it doesn’t deliver peace in the Middle East. [sent-3, score-1.282]
3 Army didn’t deliver peace in the Middle East either, and at a far higher budget than the American Political Science Association! [sent-6, score-0.631]
4 You won’t be surprised to hear that I pretty much agree with John’s comments, in particular the idea that the relevance of an academic discipline to government officials will depend on what the government’s priorities are. [sent-7, score-0.453]
5 I think few if any people would disagree with the assertion that an overwhelming majority of people who present papers at the American Political Science Association are on the left half of the political spectrum, often far left. [sent-9, score-0.665]
6 So I wonder whether much of Hayward’s critique is ideological. [sent-11, score-0.14]
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Introduction: Steven Hayward at the American Enterprise Institute wrote an article , sure to attract the attention of people such as myself, entitled, “The irrelevance of modern political science,” in which he discusses some silly-sounding papers presented at the recent American Political Science Association and then moves to a larger critique of quantitative political science: I [Hayward] have often taken a random article from the American Political Science Review, which resembles a mathematical journal on most of its pages, and asked students if they can envision this method providing the mathematical formula that will deliver peace in the Middle East. Even the dullest students usually grasp the point without difficulty. At the sister blog, John Sides discusses and dismisses Hayward’s arguments, point on that, among other things, political science might very well be useful even if it doesn’t deliver peace in the Middle East. After all, the U.S. Army didn’t deliver peace in the Midd
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Introduction: Continuing “heckle the press” month here at the blog, I (Bob) found the following “discovery” a little overplayed by David H. Freedman , who was writing for Scientific American in the following article and blog post: Blog: Why Economic Models are Always Wrong Article: A Formula for Economic Calamity The article’s paywalled, but the blog entry isn’t. Apparently, a geophysicist named Jonathan Carter (good luck finding him on the web given only that information) found that when he simulated from a complicated model, then fit the model to the simulated data, he sometimes got different results. What’s more, these differing estimates fit the data equally well but made different predictions on new data. Now we don’t know if the model was identifiable, had different local optima (i.e., multiple modes), how he fit the data, or really anything, but it doesn’t really matter. Reading the comments and article is a depressing exercise in the sociology of science, with clueles
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Introduction: From the sister blog, some reasons why the political reaction might be different this time.
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Introduction: Here’s a good one if you want to tell your students about question wording bias. It’s fun because the data are all on the web–the research is something that students could do on their own–if they know what to look for. Another win for Google. Here’s the story. I found the following graph on the front page of the American Enterprise Institute, a well-known D.C. think tank: My first thought was that they should replace this graph by a time series, which would show so much more information. I did a web search and, indeed, looking at a broad range of poll questions over time gives us a much richer perspective on public opinion about Afghanistan than is revealed in the above graph. I did a quick google search (“polling report afghanistan”) and found this . The quick summary is that roughly 40% of Americans favor the Afghan war (down from about 50% from 2006 through early 2009). The Polling Report page also features the Quninipiac poll featured in the above graph; here it r
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Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: Steven Hayward at the American Enterprise Institute wrote an article , sure to attract the attention of people such as myself, entitled, “The irrelevance of modern political science,” in which he discusses some silly-sounding papers presented at the recent American Political Science Association and then moves to a larger critique of quantitative political science: I [Hayward] have often taken a random article from the American Political Science Review, which resembles a mathematical journal on most of its pages, and asked students if they can envision this method providing the mathematical formula that will deliver peace in the Middle East. Even the dullest students usually grasp the point without difficulty. At the sister blog, John Sides discusses and dismisses Hayward’s arguments, point on that, among other things, political science might very well be useful even if it doesn’t deliver peace in the Middle East. After all, the U.S. Army didn’t deliver peace in the Midd
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Introduction: Will Wilkinson adds to the discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s remarks regarding the overwhelming prevalance of liberal or left-wing attitudes among psychology professors. I pretty much agree with Wilkinson’s overview: Folks who constantly agree with one another grow insular, self-congratulatory, and not a little lazy. The very possibility of disagreement starts to seem weird or crazy. When you’re trying to do science about human beings, this attitude’s not so great. Wilkinson also reviewed the work of John Jost in this area. Jost is a psychology researcher with the expected liberal/left political leanings, but his relevance here is that he has actually done research on political attitudes and personality types. In Wilkinson’s words: Jost has done plenty of great work that helps explain not only why the best minds in science are liberal, but why most scientists-most academics, even-are liberal. Individuals with the personality trait that most strongly predicts an inclinati
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Introduction: A link from Tyler Cowen led me to this long blog article by Razib Khan, discussing some recent genetic findings on human origins in the context of the past twenty-five years of research and popularization of science. I don’t know much about human origins (beyond my ooh-that’s-cool reactions to exhibits at the Natural History Museum, my general statistician’s skepticism at various over-the-top claims I’ve heard over the years about “mitochondrial Eve” and the like, and various bits I’ve read over the years regarding when people came over to Australia, America, etc.), but what particularly interested me about Khan’s article was his discussion about the various controversies among scientists, his own reactions when reading and thinking about these issues as they were happening (Khan was a student at the time), and the interaction between science and political ideology. There’s a limit to how far you can go with this sort of cultural criticism of science, and Khan realizes this
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Introduction: Mark Palko asks what I think of this news article by John Tierney. The article’s webpage is given the strange incomplete title above. My first comment is that the headline appears false. I didn’t see any evidence presented of liberal bias. (If the headline says “Social psychologists detect,” I expect to see some detection, not just anecdotes.) What I did see was a discussion of the fact that most academic psychologists consider themselves politically liberal (a pattern that holds for academic researchers in general), along with some anecdotes of moderates over the years who have felt their political views disrespected by the liberal majority. I’m interested in the topic, and I’m open to the possibility that there are all sorts of biases in academic research–but I don’t see the evidence from this article that social psychologists have detected any bias yet. Phrases such as “a statistically impossible lack of diversity” are just silly. What I really wonder is what John Jo
Introduction: Q. D. Leavis wrote: The answer does seem to be that the academic world, like other worlds, is run by the politicians, and sensitively scrupulous people tend to leave politics to other people, while people with genuine work to do certainly have no time as well as no taste for committee-rigging and the associated techniques. And then of course there are the forces of native stupidity reinforced by that blind hostility to criticism, reform, new ideas and superior ability which is human as well as academic nature. Not that I’ve ever read anything by Mrs. Leavis (or, as the Brits used to write, Mrs Leavis). The above quote is one of the epigraphs to a book by Richard Kostelanetz. Whom I’ve never heard of, except in a footnote in John Rodden’s classic Orwell study, The Politics of Literary Reputation. I’ll have more to say about Orwell in another post, but for now let me return to the above Leavis quote, to which I have three reactions: 1. On a personal level, I’m on Leavis’s s
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Introduction: Mark Johnstone writes: I’ve recently been investigating a new European Court of Justice ruling on insurance calculations (on behalf of MoneySuperMarket) and I found something related to statistics that caught my attention. . . . The ruling (which comes into effect in December 2012) states that insurers in Europe can no longer provide different premiums based on gender. Despite the fact that women are statistically safer drivers, unless it’s biologically proven there is a causal relationship between being female and being a safer driver, this is now seen as an act of discrimination (more on this from the Wall Street Journal). However, where do you stop with this? What about age? What about other factors? And what does this mean for the application of statistics in general? Is it inherently unjust in this context? One proposal has been to fit ‘black boxes’ into cars so more individual data can be collected, as opposed to relying heavily on aggregates. For fans of data and s
Introduction: After noticing these remarks on expensive textbooks and this comment on the company that bribes professors to use their books, Preston McAfee pointed me to this update (complete with a picture of some guy who keeps threatening to sue him but never gets around to it). The story McAfee tells is sad but also hilarious. Especially the part about “smuck.” It all looks like one more symptom of the imploding market for books. Prices for intro stat and econ books go up and up (even mediocre textbooks routinely cost $150), and the publishers put more and more effort into promotion. McAfee adds: I [McAfee] hope a publisher sues me about posting the articles I wrote. Even a takedown notice would be fun. I would be pretty happy to start posting about that, especially when some of them are charging $30 per article. Ted Bergstrom and I used state Freedom of Information acts to extract the journal price deals at state university libraries. We have about 35 of them so far. Like te
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Introduction: Sometimes when I submit an article to a journal it is accepted right away or with minor alterations. But many of my favorite articles were rejected or had to go through an exhausting series of revisions. For example, this influential article had a very hostile referee and we had to seriously push the journal editor to accept it. This one was rejected by one or two journals before finally appearing with discussion. This paper was rejected by the American Political Science Review with no chance of revision and we had to publish it in the British Journal of Political Science, which was a bit odd given that the article was 100% about American politics. And when I submitted this instant classic (actually at the invitation of the editor), the referees found it to be trivial, and the editor did me the favor of publishing it but only by officially labeling it as a discussion of another article that appeared in the same issue. Some of my most influential papers were accepted right
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Introduction: A colleague writes: When I was in NYC I went to this party by group of Japanese bio-scientists. There, one guy told me about how the biggest pharmaceutical company in Japan did their statistics. They ran 100 different tests and reported the most significant one. (This was in 2006 and he said they stopped doing this few years back so they were doing this until pretty recently…) I’m not sure if this was 100 multiple comparison or 100 different kinds of test but I’m sure they wouldn’t want to disclose their data… Ouch!
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Introduction: Blogger Deep Climate looks at another paper by the 2002 recipient of the American Statistical Association’s Founders award. This time it’s not funny, it’s just sad. Here’s Wikipedia on simulated annealing: By analogy with this physical process, each step of the SA algorithm replaces the current solution by a random “nearby” solution, chosen with a probability that depends on the difference between the corresponding function values and on a global parameter T (called the temperature), that is gradually decreased during the process. The dependency is such that the current solution changes almost randomly when T is large, but increasingly “downhill” as T goes to zero. The allowance for “uphill” moves saves the method from becoming stuck at local minima—which are the bane of greedier methods. And here’s Wegman: During each step of the algorithm, the variable that will eventually represent the minimum is replaced by a random solution that is chosen according to a temperature
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