andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-365 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Brayden King points to this page of materials on sociologist Erving Goffman. Whenever I’ve read about Goffman, it always seems to be in conjunction with some story about his bad behavior–in that respect, King’s link above does not disappoint. In the absence of any context, it all seems mysterious to me Once or twice I’ve tried to read passages in books by Goffman but have never manage to get through any of it. (This is not mean as any kind of criticism, it’s just a statement of my lack of knowledge.) I was amused enough by the stories reported by King that I clicked through to the Biographical Materials section of the Goffman page and read a few. I still couldn’t really quite get the point, though, perhaps in part because I only know one of the many people on that list.
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4 (This is not mean as any kind of criticism, it’s just a statement of my lack of knowledge. [sent-4, score-0.299]
5 ) I was amused enough by the stories reported by King that I clicked through to the Biographical Materials section of the Goffman page and read a few. [sent-5, score-0.865]
6 I still couldn’t really quite get the point, though, perhaps in part because I only know one of the many people on that list. [sent-6, score-0.295]
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same-blog 1 1.0 365 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-24-Erving Goffman archives
Introduction: Brayden King points to this page of materials on sociologist Erving Goffman. Whenever I’ve read about Goffman, it always seems to be in conjunction with some story about his bad behavior–in that respect, King’s link above does not disappoint. In the absence of any context, it all seems mysterious to me Once or twice I’ve tried to read passages in books by Goffman but have never manage to get through any of it. (This is not mean as any kind of criticism, it’s just a statement of my lack of knowledge.) I was amused enough by the stories reported by King that I clicked through to the Biographical Materials section of the Goffman page and read a few. I still couldn’t really quite get the point, though, perhaps in part because I only know one of the many people on that list.
Introduction: In response to my most recent post expressing bafflement over the Erving Goffman mystique, several commenters helped out by suggesting classic Goffman articles for me to read. Naturally, I followed the reference that had a link attached–it was for an article called Cooling the Mark Out, which analogized the frustrations of laid-off and set-aside white-collar workers to the reactions to suckers after being bilked by con artists. Goffman’s article was fascinating, but I was bothered by a tone of smugness. Here’s a quote from Cooling the Mark Out that starts on the cute side but is basically ok: In organizations patterned after a bureaucratic model, it is customary for personnel to expect rewards of a specified kind upon fulfilling requirements of a specified nature. Personnel come to define their career line in terms of a sequence of legitimate expectations and to base their self-conceptions on the assumption that in due course they will be what the institution allows persons t
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Introduction: Torbjørn Skardhamar writes: I am a sociologist/criminologist working at Statistics Norway. As I am not a trained statistician, I find myself sometimes in need to check basic statistical concepts. Recently, I came across an article which I found a bit strange, but I needed to check up on my statistical understanding of a very basic concept: the r-squared. When doing so, I realized that this was also an interesting case of research ethics. Given your interest in research ethics, I though this might be interesting to you. Here’s the mentioned article, by Weisburd and Piquero, is attached. What they do is to analyzed reported results from all articles published in the highest ranking criminological journal since 1968 through 2005 to determine whether there are any progress in the field of criminology. Their approach is basically to calculate the average r-square from linear models in published articles. For example, they state that “variance explained provides one way to assess
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Introduction: I was asked by Sophie Roell, an editor at The Browser , where every day they ask an expert in a field to recommend the top five books, not by them, in their subject. I was asked to recommend five books on how Americans vote. The trouble is that I’m really pretty unfamiliar with the academic literature of political science, but it seemed sort of inappropriate for a political scientist such as myself to recommend non-scholarly books that I like (for example, “Style vs. Substance” by George V. Higgins, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” by James Loewen, “The Rascal King” by Jack Beatty, “Republican Party Reptile” by P. J. O’Rourke, and, of course, “All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren). I mean, what’s the point of that? Nobody needs me to recommend books like that. Instead, I moved sideways and asked if I could discuss five books on statistics instead. Roell said that would be fine, so I sent her a quick description, which appears below. The actual interview turned out much bett
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Introduction: For background, you can start by reading my recent article, Is It Possible to Be an Ethicist Without Being Mean to People? and then a blog post, Quality over Quantity , by John Cook, who writes: At one point [Ed] Tufte spoke more generally and more personally about pursuing quality over quantity. He said most papers are not worth reading and that he learned early on to concentrate on the great papers, maybe one in 500, that are worth reading and rereading rather than trying to “keep up with the literature.” He also explained how over time he has concentrated more on showcasing excellent work than on criticizing bad work. You can see this in the progression from his first book to his latest. (Criticizing bad work is important too, but you’ll have to read his early books to find more of that. He won’t spend as much time talking about it in his course.) That reminded me of Jesse Robbins’ line: “Don’t fight stupid. You are better than that. Make more awesome.” This made me stop an
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same-blog 1 0.96202284 365 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-24-Erving Goffman archives
Introduction: Brayden King points to this page of materials on sociologist Erving Goffman. Whenever I’ve read about Goffman, it always seems to be in conjunction with some story about his bad behavior–in that respect, King’s link above does not disappoint. In the absence of any context, it all seems mysterious to me Once or twice I’ve tried to read passages in books by Goffman but have never manage to get through any of it. (This is not mean as any kind of criticism, it’s just a statement of my lack of knowledge.) I was amused enough by the stories reported by King that I clicked through to the Biographical Materials section of the Goffman page and read a few. I still couldn’t really quite get the point, though, perhaps in part because I only know one of the many people on that list.
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Introduction: I sometimes get books in the mail that seem right in my wheelhouse, but actually I have nothing useful to say because I’m not part of the target audience. An example: the book Painting With Numbers by Randall Bolton on “presenting financials and other numbers so people will understand you.” The author seems well-connected; the book has blurbs from a CEO, a COO, a bank vice-chairman, a former White House chief of staff, and Congressman Tom Campbell. So I assume the author knows something about business communication. But I have no way of evaluating the book. Any given page seems to contain useful information—for example, I just opened to page 73, which is all about not wasting your audience’s time, a principle which I am often emphasizing. Now I flip to page 120, which has “Long-Term Payoff Tip #8: Document Your Work!” Good point. My next flip takes us to page 175, which covers the value of getting audience feedback. Given that all these randomly-selected pages have good ad
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen links approvingly to this review by B. R. Myers of a book that I haven’t read. Unlike Cowen, I haven’t seen the book in question–so far, I’ve only read the excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker–but I can say that I found Myers’s review very annoying. Myers writes: The same narrator who gives us “sucked” and “very into” also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang. . . . But if Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. . . . Are we to chuckle at the adult woman for writing this in seriousness, or is she mocking her younger self, the teenage ra
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Introduction: This is my last entry derived from Anthony Burgess’s book reviews , and it’ll be short. His review of Angus Wilson’s “The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works” is a wonderfully balanced little thing. Nothing incredibly deep–like most items in the collection, the review is only two pages long–but I give it credit for being a rare piece of Kipling criticism I’ve seen that (a) seriously engages with the politics, without (b) congratulating itself on bravely going against the fashions of the politically incorrect chattering classes by celebrating Kipling’s magnificent achievement blah blah blah. Instead, Burgess shows respect for Kipling’s work and puts it in historical, biographical, and literary context. Burgess concludes that Wilson’s book “reminds us, in John Gross’s words, that Kipling ‘remains a haunting, unsettling presence, with whom we still have to come to terms.’ Still.” Well put, and generous of Burgess to end his review with another’s quote. Other cri
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Introduction: At the sister blog, David Frum writes , of a book by historian Laura Kalman about the politics of the 1970s: As a work of history about the Ford and Carter years, there is nothing seriously wrong with it. The facts are accurate, the writing is clear and the point of view is not tendentious. Once upon a time, such a book might have been useful to somebody. But the question it raises–and it’s not a question about this book alone–is: What’s the point of this kind of history in the age of the Internet? Suppose I’m an undergraduate who stumbles for the first time across the phrase “Proposition 13.” I could, if I were minded, walk over to the university library, pull this book from the shelf and flip to the index. Or I could save myself two hours and Google it. I wouldn’t learn more from a Google search than I’d learn in these pages. But I wouldn’t learn a whole lot less either. As a textbook writer, I think about some of these issues too! I have two things to add to Frum’s rem
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Introduction: Devah Pager points me to this article by Uri Simonsohn, which begins: Three articles published [by Brett Pelham et al.] have shown that a disproportionate share of people choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their own. These findings, interpreted as evidence of implicit egotism, are included in most modern social psychology textbooks and many university courses. The current article successfully replicates the original findings but shows that they are most likely caused by a combination of cohort, geographic, and ethnic confounds as well as reverse causality. From Simonsohn’s article, here’s a handy summary of the claims and the evidence (click on it to enlarge): The Pelham et al. articles have come up several times on the blog, starting with this discussion and this estimate and then more recently here . I’m curious what Pelham and his collaborators think of Simonsohn’s claims.
2 0.87664926 2166 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-10-3 years out of date on the whole Dennis the dentist thing!
Introduction: Paging Uri Simonsohn . . . January 2014: Alice Robb writes , completely uncritically: “If Your Name is Dennis, You’re More Likely to Become a Dentist The strange science of how names shape careers.” But look what you can learn from a quick google: Hmmmm, maybe worth following up on that second link . . . More details here , from 2011: Devah Pager points me to this article by Uri Simonsohn, which begins: Three articles published [by Brett Pelham et al.] have shown that a disproportionate share of people choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their own. These findings, interpreted as evidence of implicit egotism, are included in most modern social psychology textbooks and many university courses. The current article successfully replicates the original findings but shows that they are most likely caused by a combination of cohort, geographic, and ethnic confounds as well as reverse causality. From Simonsohn’s article, here’s a han
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Introduction: Brayden King points to this page of materials on sociologist Erving Goffman. Whenever I’ve read about Goffman, it always seems to be in conjunction with some story about his bad behavior–in that respect, King’s link above does not disappoint. In the absence of any context, it all seems mysterious to me Once or twice I’ve tried to read passages in books by Goffman but have never manage to get through any of it. (This is not mean as any kind of criticism, it’s just a statement of my lack of knowledge.) I was amused enough by the stories reported by King that I clicked through to the Biographical Materials section of the Goffman page and read a few. I still couldn’t really quite get the point, though, perhaps in part because I only know one of the many people on that list.
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Introduction: Peter Woit links to Steve Hsu linking to a 1977 interview by Katherine Sopka of physics professor Sidney Coleman. I don’t know anything about Coleman’s research but the interview caught my eye because one of my roommates in grad school was one of Coleman’s advisees. Anyway, here’s the key bit from the interview: Sopka: But you do enjoy working with students or do you? Coleman: No. I hate it. You do it as part of the job. Well, that’s of course false…or maybe more true than false when I say I hate it. Occasionally there’s a student who is a joy to work with. But I certainly would be just as happy if I had no graduate students… Sopka: I guess your remark means then that you would like to avoid teaching undergraduate courses or even required graduate courses… Coleman: Or even special topics courses. Teaching is unpleasant work. No question about it. It has its rewards. One feels happy about having a job well done. Washing the dishes, waxing the floors (things I also
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Introduction: Jeff Heer and Mike Bostock provided Mechanical Turk workers with a problem they had to answer using different types of charts. The lower error the workers got, the better the visualization. Here are some results from their paper Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception: Using Mechanical Turk to Assess Visualization Design : They also looked at various settings, like density, aspect ratio, spacing, etc. Visualization has become empirical science, no longer just art.
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