andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-434 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: My column in Scientific American . Check out the comments. I have to remember never ever to write about guns.
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same-blog 1 1.0 434 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-28-When Small Numbers Lead to Big Errors
Introduction: My column in Scientific American . Check out the comments. I have to remember never ever to write about guns.
2 0.18090703 976 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-27-Geophysicist Discovers Modeling Error (in Economics)
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
3 0.14997673 1836 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-02-Culture clash
Introduction: I had no idea this sort of thing even existed: I’m reminded of our discussion of Charles Murray’s recent book on social divisions among Americans. Murray talked about differences between upper and lower class, but I thought he was really talking more about differences between liberals and conservatives among the elite. (More discussion here .) In this particular case, Murray’s story about irresponsible elites seems to fit pretty well. At the elite level, you have well-connected D.C. gun lobbyists opposing any restrictions on personal weapons. As Murray might put it, the elites (Phil Spector aside) may be able to handle their guns, but some lower-class Americans cannot—they do things like give real rifles to 5-year-olds (!). As Murray writes, it’s a combination of cultural ignorance and a permissive ideology: I assume the senators who voted against the recent gun control bill wouldn’t give live weapons to their kids (or live in neighborhoods in which kids have acces
4 0.13737984 2014 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-09-False memories and statistical analysis
Introduction: Alison George interviews Elizabeth Loftus. It’s good stuff, important stuff, and it relates to my view as a statistician that uncertainty and variation are important. Uncertainty is relevant here because there are things that people remember that never happened. Variation is important because different people remember different things. Loftus’s work also seems relevant to the problems with pseudoscience that we’ve been discussing recently on the blog, studies where researchers follow the forms of scientific reasoning and publish in scientific journals, but what they are publishing is essentially unreplicable noise. Perhaps there’s some connection between all those people Loftus has interviewed, who remember events that never happened to them, and people such as Daryl Bem, who think they’ve computed rigorous p-values even though their analyses seem so clearly to be contingent on the data. It’s almost like a false memory, that scientists convince themselves that the analysis the
Introduction: Earlier today, Nate criticized a U.S. military survey that asks troops the question, “Do you currently serve with a male or female Service member you believe to be homosexual.” [emphasis added] As Nate points out, by asking this question in such a speculative way, “it would seem that you’ll be picking up a tremendous number of false positives–soldiers who are believed to be gay, but aren’t–and that these false positives will swamp any instances in which soldiers (in spite of DADT) are actually somewhat open about their same-sex attractions.” This is a general problem in survey research. In an article in Chance magazine in 1997, “The myth of millions of annual self-defense gun uses: a case study of survey overestimates of rare events” [see here for related references], David Hemenway uses the false-positive, false-negative reasoning to explain this bias in terms of probability theory. Misclassifications that induce seemingly minor biases in estimates of certain small probab
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same-blog 1 0.98818052 434 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-28-When Small Numbers Lead to Big Errors
Introduction: My column in Scientific American . Check out the comments. I have to remember never ever to write about guns.
Introduction: I’ve recently started a regular column on ethics, appearing every three months in Chance magazine . My first column, “Open Data and Open Methods,” is here , and my second column, “Statisticians: When we teach, we don’t practice what we preach” (coauthored with Eric Loken) will be appearing in the next issue. Statistical ethics is a wide-open topic, and I’d be very interested in everyone’s thoughts, questions, and stories. I’d like to get beyond generic questions such as, Is it right to do a randomized trial when you think the treatment is probably better than the control?, and I’d also like to avoid the really easy questions such as, Is it ethical to copy Wikipedia entries and then sell the resulting publication for $2800 a year? [Note to people who are sick of hearing about this particular story: I'll consider stopping my blogging on it, the moment that the people involved consider apologizing for their behavior.] Please insert your thoughts, questions, stories, links, et
3 0.58522469 1755 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-09-Plaig
Introduction: This , from Jeremy Duns (previously encountered here ), resonates with me: When I asked Thayer why he hadn’t cited Zeigler, he told me very forcefully that he had cited everything , and accused me of libelling him: this means, presumably, that he accused me of libel without checking his article and seeing the ‘citations’ weren’t there. And when he did finally spot that, why did he not tell me I was right, apologize, get them added and explain to me, on his site, below the article or anywhere else that his editor had accidentally missed out his attributions? It’s so frustrating. The kind of people who cheat also seem to be the kind of people who lie when caught at it, and the kind of people who never ever apologize .
4 0.57826048 1237 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-30-Statisticians: When We Teach, We Don’t Practice What We Preach
Introduction: My new Chance ethics column (cowritten with Eric Loken). Click through and take a look. It’s a short article and I really like it. And here’s more Chance.
5 0.57817686 1830 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-Giving credit where due
Introduction: Gregg Easterbrook may not always be on the ball, but I 100% endorse the last section of his recent column (scroll down to “Absurd Specificity Watch”). Earlier in the column, Easterbrook has a plug for Tim Tebow. I’d forgotten about Tim Tebow.
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same-blog 1 0.9714039 434 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-28-When Small Numbers Lead to Big Errors
Introduction: My column in Scientific American . Check out the comments. I have to remember never ever to write about guns.
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Introduction: I received the following email, subject line “Want to Buy Text Link from andrewgelman.com”: Dear, I am Mary Taylor. I have started a link building campaign for my growing websites. For this, I need your cooperation. The campaign is quite diverse and large scale and if you take some time to understand it – it will benefit us. First I want to clarify that I do not want “blogroll” ”footer” or any other type of “site wide links”. Secondly I want links from inner pages of site – with good page rank of course. Third links should be within text so that Google may not mark them as spam – not for you and not for me. Hence this link building will cause almost no harm to your site or me. Because content links are fine with Google. Now I should come to the requirements. I will accept links from Page Rank 3 to as high as you have got. Also kindly note that I can buy 1 to 50 links from one site – so you should understand the scale of the project. If you have multiple sites with co
3 0.92659134 677 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-24-My NOAA story
Introduction: I recently learned we have some readers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration so I thought I’d share an old story. About 35 years ago my brother worked briefly as a clerk at NOAA in their D.C. (or maybe it was D.C.-area) office. His job was to enter the weather numbers that came in. He had a boss who was very orderly. At one point there was a hurricane that wiped out some weather station in the Caribbean, and his boss told him to put in the numbers anyway. My brother protested that they didn’t have the data, to which his boss replied: “I know what the numbers are.” Nowadays we call this sort of thing “imputation” and we like it. But not in the raw data! I bet nowadays they have an NA code.
4 0.92524946 189 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-06-Proposal for a moratorium on the use of the words “fashionable” and “trendy”
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to an interesting article by Terry Teachout on David Mamet’s political conservatism. I don’t think of playwrights as gurus, but I do find it interesting to consider the political orientations of authors and celebrities . I have only one problem with Teachout’s thought-provoking article. He writes: As early as 2002 . . . Arguing that “the Western press [had] embraced antisemitism as the new black,” Mamet drew a sharp contrast between that trendy distaste for Jews and the harsh realities of daily life in Israel . . . In 2006, Mamet published a collection of essays called The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Jewish Self-Hatred and the Jews that made the point even more bluntly. “The Jewish State,” he wrote, “has offered the Arab world peace since 1948; it has received war, and slaughter, and the rhetoric of annihilation.” He went on to argue that secularized Jews who “reject their birthright of ‘connection to the Divine’” succumb in time to a self-hatred tha
5 0.91579258 211 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-17-Deducer update
Introduction: A year ago we blogged about Ian Fellows’s R Gui called Deducer (oops, my bad, I meant to link to this ). Fellows sends in this update: Since version 0.1, I [Fellows] have added: 1. A nice plug-in interface, so that people can extend Deducer’s capability without leaving the comfort of R. (see: http://www.deducer.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Development ) 2. Several new dialogs. 3. A one-step installer for windows. 4. A plug-in package (DeducerExtras) which extends the scope of analyses covered. 5. A plotting GUI that can create anything from simple histograms to complex custom graphics. Deducer is designed to be a free easy to use alternative to proprietary data analysis software such as SPSS, JMP, and Minitab. It has a menu system to do common data manipulation and analysis tasks, and an excel-like spreadsheet in which to view and edit data frames. The goal of the project is two fold. Provide an intuitive interface so that non-technical users can learn and p
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