andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-432 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Steve Hsu, who started off this discussion, had some comments on my speculations on the personality of John von Neumann and others. Steve writes: I [Hsu] actually knew Feynman a bit when I was an undergrad, and found him to be very nice to students. Since then I have heard quite a few stories from people in theoretical physics which emphasize his nastier side, and I think in the end he was quite a complicated person like everyone else. There are a couple of pseudo-biographies of vN, but none as high quality as, e.g., Gleick’s book on Feynman or Hodges book about Turing. (Gleick studied physics as an undergrad at Harvard, and Hodges is a PhD in mathematical physics — pretty rare backgrounds for biographers!) For example, as mentioned on the comment thread to your post, Steve Heims wrote a book about both vN and Wiener (!), and Norman Macrae wrote a biography of vN. Both books are worth reading, but I think neither really do him justice. The breadth of vN’s work is just too m
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1 Steve Hsu, who started off this discussion, had some comments on my speculations on the personality of John von Neumann and others. [sent-1, score-0.331]
2 Since then I have heard quite a few stories from people in theoretical physics which emphasize his nastier side, and I think in the end he was quite a complicated person like everyone else. [sent-3, score-0.451]
3 , Gleick’s book on Feynman or Hodges book about Turing. [sent-6, score-0.294]
4 (Gleick studied physics as an undergrad at Harvard, and Hodges is a PhD in mathematical physics — pretty rare backgrounds for biographers! [sent-7, score-0.731]
5 ) For example, as mentioned on the comment thread to your post, Steve Heims wrote a book about both vN and Wiener (! [sent-8, score-0.363]
6 The breadth of vN’s work is just too much for any one person to absorb, ranging from pure math to foundations of QM, to shock wave theory (important for nuclear weapons), to game theory, to computation. [sent-11, score-0.729]
7 I read the biography of Gell-Mann that came out several years ago, and it made me feel sad for the guy. [sent-12, score-0.25]
8 I’m still interested in the von Neumann paradox, but given what’s been written in the comment thread so far, I’m at this point doubting that it will ever be resolved to my satisfaction. [sent-14, score-0.589]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 432 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-27-Neumann update
Introduction: Steve Hsu, who started off this discussion, had some comments on my speculations on the personality of John von Neumann and others. Steve writes: I [Hsu] actually knew Feynman a bit when I was an undergrad, and found him to be very nice to students. Since then I have heard quite a few stories from people in theoretical physics which emphasize his nastier side, and I think in the end he was quite a complicated person like everyone else. There are a couple of pseudo-biographies of vN, but none as high quality as, e.g., Gleick’s book on Feynman or Hodges book about Turing. (Gleick studied physics as an undergrad at Harvard, and Hodges is a PhD in mathematical physics — pretty rare backgrounds for biographers!) For example, as mentioned on the comment thread to your post, Steve Heims wrote a book about both vN and Wiener (!), and Norman Macrae wrote a biography of vN. Both books are worth reading, but I think neither really do him justice. The breadth of vN’s work is just too m
2 0.35433781 430 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-25-The von Neumann paradox
Introduction: I, like Steve Hsu , I too would love to read a definitive biography of John von Neumann (or, as we’d say in the U.S., “John Neumann”). I’ve read little things about him in various places such as Stanislaw Ulam’s classic autobiography, and two things I’ve repeatedly noticed are: 1. Neumann comes off as a obnoxious, self-satisfied jerk. He just seems like the kind of guy I wouldn’t like in real life. 2. All these great men seem to really have loved the guy. It’s hard for me to reconcile two impressions above. Of course, lots of people have a good side and a bad side, but what’s striking here is that my impressions of Neumann’s bad side come from the very stories that his friends use to demonstrate how lovable he was! So, yes, I’d like to see the biography–but only if it could resolve this paradox. Also, I don’t know how relevant this is, but Neumann shares one thing with the more-lovable Ulam and the less-lovable Mandelbrot: all had Jewish backgrounds but didn’t seem to
3 0.12603833 578 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-17-Credentialism, elite employment, and career aspirations
Introduction: Steve Hsu has posted a series of reflections here , here , and here on the dominance of graduates of HYPS (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (in that order, I believe)) in various Master-of-the-Universe-type jobs at “elite law firms, consultancies, and I-banks, hedge/venture funds, startups, and technology companies.” Hsu writes: In the real world, people believe in folk notions of brainpower or IQ. (“Quick on the uptake”, “Picks things up really fast”, “A sponge” …) They count on elite educational institutions to do their g-filtering for them. . . . Most top firms only recruit at a few schools. A kid from a non-elite UG school has very little chance of finding a job at one of these places unless they first go to grad school at, e.g., HBS, HLS, or get a PhD from a top place. (By top place I don’t mean “gee US News says Ohio State’s Aero E program is top 5!” — I mean, e.g., a math PhD from Berkeley or a PhD in computer science from MIT — the traditional top dogs in academ
4 0.1089872 2283 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-06-An old discussion of food deserts
Introduction: I happened to be reading an old comment thread from 2012 (follow the link from here ) and came across this amusing exchange: Perhaps this is the paper Jonathan was talking about? Here’s more from the thread: Anyway, I don’t have anything to add right now, I just thought it was an interesting discussion.
5 0.10563207 916 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-18-Multimodality in hierarchical models
Introduction: Jim Hodges posted a note to the Bugs mailing list that I thought could be of more general interest: Is multi-modality a common experience? I [Hodges] think the answer is “nobody knows in any generality”. Here are some examples of bimodality that certainly do *not* involve the kind of labeling problems that arise in mixture models. The only systematic study of multimodality I know of is Liu J, Hodges JS (2003). Posterior bimodality in the balanced one-way random effects model. J.~Royal Stat.~Soc., Ser.~B, 65:247-255. The surprise of this paper is that in the simplest possible hierarchical model (analyzed using the standard inverse-gamma priors for the two variances), bimodality occurs quite readily, although it is much less common to have two modes that are big enough so that you’d actually get a noticeable fraction of MCMC draws from both of them. Because the restricted likelihood (= the marginal posterior for the two variances, if you’ve put flat priors on them) is
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Introduction: Steve Hsu, who started off this discussion, had some comments on my speculations on the personality of John von Neumann and others. Steve writes: I [Hsu] actually knew Feynman a bit when I was an undergrad, and found him to be very nice to students. Since then I have heard quite a few stories from people in theoretical physics which emphasize his nastier side, and I think in the end he was quite a complicated person like everyone else. There are a couple of pseudo-biographies of vN, but none as high quality as, e.g., Gleick’s book on Feynman or Hodges book about Turing. (Gleick studied physics as an undergrad at Harvard, and Hodges is a PhD in mathematical physics — pretty rare backgrounds for biographers!) For example, as mentioned on the comment thread to your post, Steve Heims wrote a book about both vN and Wiener (!), and Norman Macrae wrote a biography of vN. Both books are worth reading, but I think neither really do him justice. The breadth of vN’s work is just too m
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Introduction: Sophie Roell, who interviewed me for 5books (background here ), reports that 5books has become a book. Or, to be precise, that they have released a collection of the 5books interviews as an ebook . Interviewees include me, some people I’d never heard of, and a bunch of legitimate bigshots such as Ian McEwen and Steven Pinker. I’d say it’s fun and often unexpected bathroom reading, but then you’d need a book tablet (a “kindle”? What do you call these things generically?) in that special room. But then again, maybe you already do! P.S. You might be also interested in this list (from a few years ago). Comments are closed on that entry (I know there’s a way to get them unclosed but I can’t figure out how), so feel free to leave your comments/suggestions here if you want to opine on the best nonfiction books.
3 0.8403731 57 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-29-Roth and Amsterdam
Introduction: I used to think that fiction is about making up stories, but in recent years I’ve decided that fiction is really more of a method of telling true stories. One thing fiction allows you to do is explore what-if scenarios. I recently read two books that made me think about this: The Counterlife by Philip Roth and Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam. Both books are explicitly about contingencies and possibilities: Roth’s tells a sequence of related but contradictory stories involving his Philip Roth-like (of course) protagonist, and Amsterdam’s is based on an alternative present/future. (I picture Amsterdam’s book as being set in Australia, but maybe I’m just imagining this based on my knowledge that the book was written and published in that country.) I found both books fascinating, partly because of the characters’ voices but especially because they both seemed to exemplify George Box’s dictum that to understand a system you have to perturb it. So, yes, literature an
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Introduction: I was stunned this from Jenny Davidson about mystery writers: The crime fiction community is smart and adult and welcoming, and so many good books are being written (Lee Child was mentioning his peer group – i.e. they were the new kids around the same tie – being Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman – the list speaks for itself) . . . Why was I stunned? Because just a few days earlier I had a look at a book by Robert Crais. It just happened that Phil, when he was visiting, had finished this book (which he described as “pretty good”) and left it with me so he wouldn’t have to take it back with him. I’d never heard of Crais, but it had pretty amazing blurbs on the cover and Phil recommended it, so I took a look. It was bad. From page 1 it was bad. It was like a bad cop show. I could see the seams where the sentences were stitched together. I could see how somebody might like this sort of book, but I certainly can’t understand the blurbs or the i
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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: The list includes “hunting” but not “fishing,” so that’s cool. I wonder how they’d feel about a question involving different cuts of meat. In any case, I’m happy to see that “Bayes” is not on the banned list. P.S. Russell explains .
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Introduction: By popular demand, here’s my R script for the time-use graphs : # The data a1 <- c(4.2,3.2,11.1,1.3,2.2,2.0) a2 <- c(3.9,3.2,10.0,0.8,3.1,3.1) a3 <- c(6.3,2.5,9.8,0.9,2.2,2.4) a4 <- c(4.4,3.1,9.8,0.8,3.3,2.7) a5 <- c(4.8,3.0,9.9,0.7,3.3,2.4) a6 <- c(4.0,3.4,10.5,0.7,3.3,2.1) a <- rbind(a1,a2,a3,a4,a5,a6) avg <- colMeans (a) avg.array <- t (array (avg, rev(dim(a)))) diff <- a - avg.array country.name <- c("France", "Germany", "Japan", "Britain", "USA", "Turkey") # The line plots par (mfrow=c(2,3), mar=c(4,4,2,.5), mgp=c(2,.7,0), tck=-.02, oma=c(3,0,4,0), bg="gray96", fg="gray30") for (i in 1:6){ plot (c(1,6), c(-1,1.7), xlab="", ylab="", xaxt="n", yaxt="n", bty="l", type="n") lines (1:6, diff[i,], col="blue") points (1:6, diff[i,], pch=19, col="black") if (i>3){ axis (1, c(1,3,5), c ("Work,\nstudy", "Eat,\nsleep", "Leisure"), mgp=c(2,1.5,0), tck=0, cex.axis=1.2) axis (1, c(2,4,6), c ("Unpaid\nwork", "Personal\nCare", "Other"), mgp=c(2,1.5,0),
3 0.93248481 2298 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-21-On deck this week
Introduction: Mon : Ticket to Baaaath Tues : Ticket to Baaaaarf Wed : Thinking of doing a list experiment? Here’s a list of reasons why you should think again Thurs : An open site for researchers to post and share papers Fri : Questions about “Too Good to Be True” Sat : Sleazy sock puppet can’t stop spamming our discussion of compressed sensing and promoting the work of Xiteng Liu Sun : White stripes and dead armadillos
4 0.92252403 151 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Wanted: Probability distributions for rank orderings
Introduction: Dietrich Stoyan writes: I asked the IMS people for an expert in statistics of voting/elections and they wrote me your name. I am a statistician, but never worked in the field voting/elections. It was my son-in-law who asked me for statistical theories in that field. He posed in particular the following problem: The aim of the voting is to come to a ranking of c candidates. Every vote is a permutation of these c candidates. The problem is to have probability distributions in the set of all permutations of c elements. Are there theories for such distributions? I should be very grateful for a fast answer with hints to literature. (I confess that I do not know your books.) My reply: Rather than trying to model the ranks directly, I’d recommend modeling a latent continuous outcome which then implies a distribution on ranks, if the ranks are of interest. There are lots of distributions of c-dimensional continuous outcomes. In political science, the usual way to start is
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Introduction: Steve Hsu, who started off this discussion, had some comments on my speculations on the personality of John von Neumann and others. Steve writes: I [Hsu] actually knew Feynman a bit when I was an undergrad, and found him to be very nice to students. Since then I have heard quite a few stories from people in theoretical physics which emphasize his nastier side, and I think in the end he was quite a complicated person like everyone else. There are a couple of pseudo-biographies of vN, but none as high quality as, e.g., Gleick’s book on Feynman or Hodges book about Turing. (Gleick studied physics as an undergrad at Harvard, and Hodges is a PhD in mathematical physics — pretty rare backgrounds for biographers!) For example, as mentioned on the comment thread to your post, Steve Heims wrote a book about both vN and Wiener (!), and Norman Macrae wrote a biography of vN. Both books are worth reading, but I think neither really do him justice. The breadth of vN’s work is just too m
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