andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-470 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: The title of this blog post quotes the second line of the abstract of Goldstein et al.’s much ballyhooed 2008 tech report, Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings . The first sentence of the abstract is Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the easy target wine snobs make, the popular press has picked up on the first sentence of the tech report. For example, the Freakonomics blog/radio entry of the same name quotes the first line, ignores the qualification, then concludes Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons, and urging you to spend $15 instead of $50 on your next bottle of wine. Go ahead, take the money you save and blow it on the lottery. In case you’re wondering about whether to buy me a cheap or expensive bottle of wine, keep in mind I’ve had classical “wine training”. After ten minutes of training with some side by
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 The title of this blog post quotes the second line of the abstract of Goldstein et al. [sent-1, score-0.32]
2 ’s much ballyhooed 2008 tech report, Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? [sent-2, score-0.284]
3 The first sentence of the abstract is Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. [sent-4, score-0.766]
4 Perhaps not surprisingly, given the easy target wine snobs make, the popular press has picked up on the first sentence of the tech report. [sent-5, score-0.873]
5 For example, the Freakonomics blog/radio entry of the same name quotes the first line, ignores the qualification, then concludes Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons, and urging you to spend $15 instead of $50 on your next bottle of wine. [sent-6, score-0.765]
6 Go ahead, take the money you save and blow it on the lottery. [sent-7, score-0.086]
7 In case you’re wondering about whether to buy me a cheap or expensive bottle of wine, keep in mind I’ve had classical “wine training”. [sent-8, score-0.497]
8 After ten minutes of training with some side by side examples, you too will be able to distinguish traditional old world wine from 3-buck Chuck in a double blind tasting. [sent-9, score-1.165]
9 Whether you’ll be able to tell a quality village Volnay from a premier cru’s another matter. [sent-10, score-0.276]
10 Wines that stand out in a side-by-side tasting are not necessarily the ones you want to pair with food or even drink all night on their own. [sent-12, score-0.418]
11 The other problem is that some people genuinely prefer the 3 buck Chuck. [sent-13, score-0.19]
12 Most Americans I’ve observed, including myself, start out enjoying sweeter new world style wines and then over time gravitate to more structured (tannic), complex (different flavors) and acidic wines. [sent-14, score-0.795]
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Introduction: The title of this blog post quotes the second line of the abstract of Goldstein et al.’s much ballyhooed 2008 tech report, Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings . The first sentence of the abstract is Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the easy target wine snobs make, the popular press has picked up on the first sentence of the tech report. For example, the Freakonomics blog/radio entry of the same name quotes the first line, ignores the qualification, then concludes Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons, and urging you to spend $15 instead of $50 on your next bottle of wine. Go ahead, take the money you save and blow it on the lottery. In case you’re wondering about whether to buy me a cheap or expensive bottle of wine, keep in mind I’ve had classical “wine training”. After ten minutes of training with some side by
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Introduction: On this blog I’ve occasionally written about the problems that arise when economists act as amateur psychologists. But the problem can go the other way, too. For example, consider this blog by Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow ( link from Abbas Raza). Brogaard and Marlow give several amusing stories about ripoffs (a restaurant that scams customers into buying expensive bottles of wine, a hairdresser that sucks customers into unnecessary treatments, a ghostwriter who takes thousands of dollars in payments and doesn’t do the job, etc.). Then they ask, “How did it happen? Why did you act in this impulsive way? Why didn’t you learn your lesson the first time around? Do you have some kind of brain damage?” They continue with some discussion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the anterior insula, etc etc etc., and then conclude with the following advice: Is there anything we can do to avoid these moments of crazy decision-making? Yes but only by intentionally turning on our
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Introduction: From a few years ago : General advice Both the papers sent to me appear to have strong research results. Now that the research has been done, I’d recommend rewriting both articles from scratch, using the following template: 1. Start with the conclusions. Write a couple pages on what you’ve found and what you recommend. In writing these conclusions, you should also be writing some of the introduction, in that you’ll need to give enough background so that general readers can understand what you’re talking about and why they should care. But you want to start with the conclusions, because that will determine what sort of background information you’ll need to give. 2. Now step back. What is the principal evidence for your conclusions? Make some graphs and pull out some key numbers that represent your research findings which back up your claims. 3. Back one more step, now. What are the methods and data you used to obtain your research findings. 4. Now go back and write the l
Introduction: Responding to a proposal to move the journal Political Analysis from double-blind to single-blind reviewing (that is, authors would not know who is reviewing their papers but reviewers would know the authors’ names), Tom Palfrey writes: I agree with the editors’ recommendation. I have served on quite a few editorial boards of journals with different blinding policies, and have seen no evidence that double blind procedures are a useful way to improve the quality of articles published in a journal. Aside from the obvious administrative nuisance and the fact that authorship anonymity is a thing of the past in our discipline, the theoretical and empirical arguments in both directions lead to an ambiguous conclusion. Also keep in mind that the editors know the identity of the authors (they need to know for practical reasons), their identity is not hidden from authors, and ultimately it is they who make the accept/reject decision, and also lobby their friends and colleagues to submit “the
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Introduction: Anthony Goldbloom writes: For those who haven’t come across Kaggle, we are a new platform for data prediction competitions. Companies and researchers put up a dataset and a problem and data scientists compete to produce the best solutions. We’ve just launched a new initiative called Kaggle in Class, allowing instructors to host competitions for their students. Competitions are a neat way to engage students, giving them the opportunity to put into practice what they learn. The platform offers live leaderboards, so students get instant feedback on the accuracy of their work. And since competitions are judged on objective criteria (predictions are compared with outcomes), the platform offers unique assessment opportunities. The first Kaggle in Class competition is being hosted by Stanford University’s Stats 202 class and requires students to predict the price of different wines based on vintage, country, ratings and other information. Those interested in hosting a competition f
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Introduction: The title of this blog post quotes the second line of the abstract of Goldstein et al.’s much ballyhooed 2008 tech report, Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better? Evidence from a Large Sample of Blind Tastings . The first sentence of the abstract is Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the easy target wine snobs make, the popular press has picked up on the first sentence of the tech report. For example, the Freakonomics blog/radio entry of the same name quotes the first line, ignores the qualification, then concludes Wishing you the happiest of holiday seasons, and urging you to spend $15 instead of $50 on your next bottle of wine. Go ahead, take the money you save and blow it on the lottery. In case you’re wondering about whether to buy me a cheap or expensive bottle of wine, keep in mind I’ve had classical “wine training”. After ten minutes of training with some side by
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Introduction: Yaming Yu and Xiao-Li Meng write in with a cool new idea for improving the efficiency of Gibbs and Metropolis in multilevel models: For a broad class of multilevel models, there exist two well-known competing parameterizations, the centered parameterization (CP) and the non-centered parameterization (NCP), for effective MCMC implementation. Much literature has been devoted to the questions of when to use which and how to compromise between them via partial CP/NCP. This article introduces an alternative strategy for boosting MCMC efficiency via simply interweaving—but not alternating—the two parameterizations. This strategy has the surprising property that failure of both the CP and NCP chains to converge geometrically does not prevent the interweaving algorithm from doing so. It achieves this seemingly magical property by taking advantage of the discordance of the two parameterizations, namely, the sufficiency of CP and the ancillarity of NCP, to substantially reduce the Markovian
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