andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-477 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining

477 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-20-Costless false beliefs


meta infos for this blog

Source: html

Introduction: From the Gallup Poll : Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. They’ve been asking the question since 1982 and it’s been pretty steady at 45%, so in some sense this is good news! (I’m saying this under the completely unsupported belief that it’s better for people to believe truths than falsehoods.) One way to think of this is that, for the overwhelming majority of people, a personal belief in young-earth creationism (or whatever you want to call it) is costless. Or, to put it another way, the discomfort involved in holding a belief that contradicts everything you were taught in school is greater than the discomfort involved in holding a belief that seems to contradict your religious values (keeping in mind that, even among those who report attending church seldom or never, a quarter of these people agree that “God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago”).


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore

1 From the Gallup Poll : Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. [sent-1, score-1.136]

2 They’ve been asking the question since 1982 and it’s been pretty steady at 45%, so in some sense this is good news! [sent-2, score-0.178]

3 (I’m saying this under the completely unsupported belief that it’s better for people to believe truths than falsehoods. [sent-3, score-0.625]

4 ) One way to think of this is that, for the overwhelming majority of people, a personal belief in young-earth creationism (or whatever you want to call it) is costless. [sent-4, score-0.373]

5 Some of this is political (see further discussion here ), but lots of Democrats and independents believe that 10,000 years thing too, so, just as with impressions about inflation and unemployment, it looks like there’s just a high general level of ignorance on the matter. [sent-6, score-0.749]

6 I don’t really have any comment on the “God guided the process” bit, as it seems vague enough to mean just about anything. [sent-10, score-0.269]

7 (I’m not saying it’s a bad survey question, just that it could pretty much mean whatever you want it to mean. [sent-11, score-0.15]

8 ) Also, I suspect that many biologists would object to the “less advanced forms of life” bit, but I think I know what people think when this question is asked. [sent-12, score-0.695]

9 Yes, I know that people are ignorant on many many topics, not just evolution, inflation, and unemployment. [sent-16, score-0.163]

10 Feel free to leave your favorites in the comments. [sent-17, score-0.087]

11 The question appears to be so that you have to either believe in evolution, or believe that humans are 10,000 years old. [sent-22, score-0.88]

12 You can’t, for example, state that humans didn’t evolve but were created 50,000 years ago. [sent-23, score-0.783]


similar blogs computed by tfidf model

tfidf for this blog:

wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)

[('god', 0.366), ('humans', 0.264), ('belief', 0.224), ('guided', 0.2), ('advanced', 0.19), ('years', 0.184), ('forms', 0.183), ('discomfort', 0.179), ('created', 0.172), ('beings', 0.167), ('believe', 0.166), ('inflation', 0.15), ('holding', 0.145), ('evolution', 0.142), ('remaining', 0.14), ('life', 0.126), ('process', 0.121), ('millions', 0.12), ('developed', 0.112), ('question', 0.1), ('contradicts', 0.096), ('evolve', 0.092), ('seldom', 0.092), ('involved', 0.092), ('ignorant', 0.09), ('favorites', 0.087), ('independents', 0.087), ('attending', 0.087), ('present', 0.087), ('human', 0.086), ('truths', 0.085), ('impressions', 0.084), ('less', 0.083), ('biologists', 0.082), ('form', 0.079), ('ignorance', 0.078), ('steady', 0.078), ('quarter', 0.077), ('unsupported', 0.077), ('whatever', 0.076), ('church', 0.076), ('survey', 0.074), ('declined', 0.074), ('overwhelming', 0.073), ('people', 0.073), ('gallup', 0.072), ('state', 0.071), ('contradict', 0.07), ('vague', 0.069), ('object', 0.067)]

similar blogs list:

simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle

same-blog 1 1.0000001 477 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-20-Costless false beliefs

Introduction: From the Gallup Poll : Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. They’ve been asking the question since 1982 and it’s been pretty steady at 45%, so in some sense this is good news! (I’m saying this under the completely unsupported belief that it’s better for people to believe truths than falsehoods.) One way to think of this is that, for the overwhelming majority of people, a personal belief in young-earth creationism (or whatever you want to call it) is costless. Or, to put it another way, the discomfort involved in holding a belief that contradicts everything you were taught in school is greater than the discomfort involved in holding a belief that seems to contradict your religious values (keeping in mind that, even among those who report attending church seldom or never, a quarter of these people agree that “God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago”).

2 0.17979413 2167 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-10-Do you believe that “humans and other living things have evolved over time”?

Introduction: The other day on the sister blog we discussed a recent Pew Research survey that seemed to show that Republicans are becoming more partisan about evolution (or, as Paul Krugman put it, “So what happened after 2009 that might be driving Republican views? . . . Republicans are being driven to identify in all ways with their tribe — and the tribal belief system is dominated by anti-science fundamentalists”). We presented some discussion and evidence from Dan Kahan suggesting that the evidence for such a change was not so clear at all. Kahan drew his conclusions from a more detailed analysis of the much-discussed Pew data, along with a comparison to a recent Gallup poll. Also following up on this is sociologist David Wealiem, who pulls some more data into the discussion: Although the Pew report mentions only the 2009 survey, the question has been asked a number of times since 2005. Here are the results—the numbers represent the percent saying “evolved” minus the percent sayin

3 0.16234197 1386 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-21-Belief in hell is associated with lower crime rates

Introduction: I remember attending a talk a few years ago by my political science colleague John Huber in which he discussed cross-national comparisons of religious attitudes. One thing I remember is that the U.S. is highly religious, another thing I remembered is that lots more Americans believe in heaven than believe in hell. Some of this went into Red State Blue State—not the heaven/hell thing, but the graph of religiosity vs. GDP: and the corresponding graph of religious attendance vs. GDP for U.S. states: Also we learned that, at the individual level, the correlation of religious attendance with income is zero (according to survey reports, rich Americans are neither more nor less likely than poor Americans to go to church regularly): while the correlation of prayer with income is strongly negative (poor Americans are much more likely than rich Americans to regularly pray): Anyway, with all this, I was primed to be interested in a recent study by psychologist

4 0.11082536 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote

Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book,  Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would

5 0.10749631 1269 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-19-Believe your models (up to the point that you abandon them)

Introduction: In a discussion of his variant of the write-a-thousand-words-a-day strategy (as he puts it, “a system for the production of academic results in writing”), Thomas Basbøll writes : Believe the claims you are making. That is, confine yourself to making claims you believe. I always emphasize this when I [Basbøll] define knowledge as “justified, true belief”. . . . I think if there is one sure way to undermine your sense of your own genius it is to begin to say things you know to be publishable without being sure they are true. Or even things you know to be “true” but don’t understand well enough to believe. He points out that this is not so easy: In times when there are strong orthodoxies it can sometimes be difficult to know what to believe. Or, rather, it is all too easy to know what to believe (what the “right belief” is). It is therefore difficult to stick to statements of one’s own belief. I sometimes worry that our universities, which are systems of formal education and for

6 0.10006827 1750 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-05-Watership Down, thick description, applied statistics, immutability of stories, and playing tennis with a net

7 0.098424748 1897 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-13-When’s that next gamma-ray blast gonna come, already?

8 0.098124824 715 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-16-“It doesn’t matter if you believe in God. What matters is if God believes in you.”

9 0.094639778 1414 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-12-Steven Pinker’s unconvincing debunking of group selection

10 0.088269547 2229 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-28-God-leaf-tree

11 0.084127426 1399 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-28-Life imitates blog

12 0.083989874 1170 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-16-A previous discussion with Charles Murray about liberals, conservatives, and social class

13 0.082893007 1548 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-25-Health disparities are associated with low life expectancy

14 0.081889167 142 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-12-God, Guns, and Gaydar: The Laws of Probability Push You to Overestimate Small Groups

15 0.081706457 1968 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-05-Evidence on the impact of sustained use of polynomial regression on causal inference (a claim that coal heating is reducing lifespan by 5 years for half a billion people)

16 0.078812599 1690 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-23-When are complicated models helpful in psychology research and when are they overkill?

17 0.077329628 604 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-08-More on the missing conservative psychology researchers

18 0.076745227 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)

19 0.074028462 1199 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-05-Any available cookbooks on Bayesian designs?

20 0.073106848 1 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-22-Political Belief Networks: Socio-cognitive Heterogeneity in American Public Opinion


similar blogs computed by lsi model

lsi for this blog:

topicId topicWeight

[(0, 0.161), (1, -0.067), (2, 0.055), (3, 0.025), (4, -0.037), (5, 0.008), (6, 0.02), (7, 0.028), (8, 0.019), (9, 0.007), (10, -0.013), (11, -0.024), (12, -0.013), (13, 0.043), (14, 0.016), (15, 0.004), (16, 0.04), (17, 0.007), (18, 0.033), (19, 0.005), (20, -0.005), (21, -0.014), (22, -0.091), (23, -0.033), (24, -0.03), (25, 0.02), (26, 0.012), (27, -0.008), (28, -0.023), (29, 0.03), (30, 0.001), (31, 0.026), (32, -0.001), (33, -0.015), (34, -0.052), (35, -0.023), (36, 0.029), (37, 0.068), (38, 0.018), (39, -0.007), (40, -0.042), (41, 0.043), (42, 0.007), (43, -0.024), (44, 0.02), (45, -0.017), (46, -0.03), (47, -0.023), (48, -0.002), (49, 0.001)]

similar blogs list:

simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle

same-blog 1 0.97050214 477 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-20-Costless false beliefs

Introduction: From the Gallup Poll : Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. They’ve been asking the question since 1982 and it’s been pretty steady at 45%, so in some sense this is good news! (I’m saying this under the completely unsupported belief that it’s better for people to believe truths than falsehoods.) One way to think of this is that, for the overwhelming majority of people, a personal belief in young-earth creationism (or whatever you want to call it) is costless. Or, to put it another way, the discomfort involved in holding a belief that contradicts everything you were taught in school is greater than the discomfort involved in holding a belief that seems to contradict your religious values (keeping in mind that, even among those who report attending church seldom or never, a quarter of these people agree that “God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago”).

2 0.79416353 707 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-12-Human nature can’t be changed (except when it can)

Introduction: I was checking the Dilbert blog (sorry! I was just curious what was up after the events of a few weeks ago) and saw this: I [Scott Adams] wonder if any old-time racists still exist. I knew a few racists when I was a kid, back in upstate New York. In my adult life, I don’t think I’ve met one. . . . I certainly understand if you’ve witnessed it, or suffered from it. I’m just saying I haven’t seen it where I live. Clearly that sort of activity is distributed unevenly around the country. Just to be clear: I’m only saying I haven’t personally witnessed overt racism in my adult life. I accept that you have seen it firsthand, if you say so. Classic racism of the old-timey variety is probably only possible in people who don’t own television sets and haven’t gone through grade school. I’ll grant you that racist prison gangs and neo-Nazis exist. But obviously something else is going on with those guys. Let’s call them the exceptions. . . . I assume discrimination must be going on somep

3 0.75650316 1646 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-01-Back when fifty years was a long time ago

Introduction: New Year’s Day is an excellent time to look back at changes, not just in the past year, but in the past half-century. Mark Palko has an interesting post on the pace of changes in everyday life. We’ve been hearing a lot in the past few decades about how things are changing faster and faster. But, as Palko points out, the difference between life in 1962 and life today does not seem so different, at least for many people in the United States. Sure, there are some big changes: nonwhites get more respect, people mostly live longer, many cancers can be cured, fewer people are really really poor but it’s harder to hold down a job, cars are more reliable, you can get fresh fish in the suburbs, containers are lighter and stronger, vacations in the Caribbean instead of the Catskills, people have a lot more stuff and a lot more place to put it, etc etc etc. But life in the 1950s or 1960s just doesn’t seem so different from how we live today. In contrast, Palko writes, “You can also get

4 0.75253493 1892 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-10-I don’t think we get much out of framing politics as the Tragic Vision vs. the Utopian Vision

Introduction: Ole Rogeberg writes: Recently read your  blogpost on Pinker’s views regarding red and blue states . This might help you see where he’s coming from: The “conflict of visions” thing that Pinker repeats to likely refers to Thomas Sowell’s work in the books “Conflict of Visions” and “Visions of the anointed.” The “Conflict of visions” book is on  his top-5 favorite book list  and in a  Q&A; interview  he explains it as follows: Q: What is the Tragic Vision vs. the Utopian Vision? A: They are the different visions of human nature that underlie left-wing and right-wing ideologies. The distinction comes from the economist Thomas Sowell in his wonderful book “A Conflict of Visions.” According to the Tragic Vision, humans are inherently limited in virtue, wisdom, and knowledge, and social arrangements must acknowledge those limits. According to the Utopian vision, these limits are “products†of our social arrangements, and we should strive to overcome them in a better society of the f

5 0.74655455 837 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-04-Is it rational to vote?

Introduction: Hear me interviewed on the topic here . P.S. The interview was fine but I don’t agree with everything on the linked website. For example, this bit: Global warming is not the first case of a widespread fear based on incomplete knowledge turned out to be false or at least greatly exaggerated. Global warming has many of the characteristics of a popular delusion, an irrational fear or cause that is embraced by millions of people because, well, it is believed by millions of people! All right, then.

6 0.73768413 1621 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-13-Puzzles of criminal justice

7 0.72935802 2167 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-10-Do you believe that “humans and other living things have evolved over time”?

8 0.72226226 1085 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-27-Laws as expressive

9 0.72148603 1548 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-25-Health disparities are associated with low life expectancy

10 0.7171495 666 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-18-American Beliefs about Economic Opportunity and Income Inequality

11 0.711182 381 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-30-Sorry, Senator DeMint: Most Americans Don’t Want to Ban Gays from the Classroom

12 0.70516217 219 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-20-Some things are just really hard to believe: more on choosing your facts.

13 0.70195955 98 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-19-Further thoughts on happiness and life satisfaction research

14 0.70133781 715 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-16-“It doesn’t matter if you believe in God. What matters is if God believes in you.”

15 0.70099062 149 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Demographics: what variable best predicts a financial crisis?

16 0.69818062 130 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-07-A False Consensus about Public Opinion on Torture

17 0.69426656 1635 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-22-More Pinker Pinker Pinker

18 0.69233286 2341 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-20-plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

19 0.69183505 1386 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-21-Belief in hell is associated with lower crime rates

20 0.68941474 1097 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-03-Libertarians in Space


similar blogs computed by lda model

lda for this blog:

topicId topicWeight

[(0, 0.02), (9, 0.013), (16, 0.072), (21, 0.029), (22, 0.223), (24, 0.107), (30, 0.015), (56, 0.017), (59, 0.011), (60, 0.016), (63, 0.044), (86, 0.03), (99, 0.273)]

similar blogs list:

simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle

1 0.96731973 448 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-03-This is a footnote in one of my papers

Introduction: In the annals of hack literature, it is sometimes said that if you aim to write best-selling crap, all you’ll end up with is crap. To truly produce best-selling crap, you have to have a conviction, perhaps misplaced, that your writing has integrity. Whether or not this is a good generalization about writing, I have seen an analogous phenomenon in statistics: If you try to do nothing but model the data, you can be in for a wild and unpleasant ride: real data always seem to have one more twist beyond our ability to model (von Neumann’s elephant’s trunk notwithstanding). But if you model the underlying process, sometimes your model can fit surprisingly well as well as inviting openings for future research progress.

2 0.94451106 1037 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-01-Lamentably common misunderstanding of meritocracy

Introduction: Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of opportunity—a place whose capitalist system benefited the hardworking and the virtuous [emphasis added]. In a word, it was a meritocracy. That’s interesting—and revealing. Here’s what I get when I look up “meritocracy” in the dictionary : 1 : a system in which the talented are chosen and moved ahead on the basis of their achievement 2 : leadership selected on the basis of intellectual criteria Nothing here about “hardworking” or “virtuous.” In a meritocracy, you can be as hardworking as John Kruk or as virtuous as Kobe Bryant and you’ll still get ahead—if you have the talent and achievement. Throwing in “hardworking” and “virtuous”

3 0.9250952 1398 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-28-Every time you take a sample, you’ll have to pay this guy a quarter

Introduction: Roy Mendelssohn pointed me to this heartwarming story of Jay Vadiveloo, an actuary who got a patent for the idea of statistical sampling. Vadiveloo writes, “the results were astounding: statistical sampling worked.” You may laugh, but wait till Albedo Man buys the patent and makes everybody do his bidding. They’re gonna dig up Laplace and make him pay retroactive royalties. And somehow Clippy will get involved in all this. P.S. Mendelssohn writes: “Yes, I felt it was a heartwarming story also. Perhaps we can get a patent for regression.” I say, forget a patent for regression. I want a patent for the sample mean. That’s where the real money is. You can’t charge a lot for each use, but consider the volume!

same-blog 4 0.9227457 477 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-20-Costless false beliefs

Introduction: From the Gallup Poll : Four in 10 Americans, slightly fewer today than in years past, believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago. They’ve been asking the question since 1982 and it’s been pretty steady at 45%, so in some sense this is good news! (I’m saying this under the completely unsupported belief that it’s better for people to believe truths than falsehoods.) One way to think of this is that, for the overwhelming majority of people, a personal belief in young-earth creationism (or whatever you want to call it) is costless. Or, to put it another way, the discomfort involved in holding a belief that contradicts everything you were taught in school is greater than the discomfort involved in holding a belief that seems to contradict your religious values (keeping in mind that, even among those who report attending church seldom or never, a quarter of these people agree that “God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago”).

5 0.91712421 385 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-31-Wacky surveys where they don’t tell you the questions they asked

Introduction: Maria Wolters writes: The parenting club Bounty, which distributes their packs through midwives, hospitals, and large UK supermarket and pharmacy chains, commissioned a fun little survey for Halloween from the company OnePoll . Theme: Mothers as tricksters – tricking men into fathering their babies. You can find a full smackdown courtesy of UK-based sex educator and University College London psychologist Petra Boynton here . (One does wonder how a parenting club with such close links to the UK National Health Service thought a survey on this topic was at all appropriate, but that’s another rant.) So far, so awful, but what I [Wolters] thought might grab your attention was the excuse OnePoll offered for their work in their email to Petra. (Petra is very well known in the UK, and so was able to get a statement from the polling company.) Here it is in its full glory, taken from Petra’s post: As the agency which commissioned this research and distributed the resulting new

6 0.9129467 1700 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-31-Snotty reviewers

7 0.91264534 92 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-17-Drug testing for recipents of NSF and NIH grants?

8 0.90954757 145 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-13-Statistical controversy regarding human rights violations in Colomnbia

9 0.90762609 504 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-05-For those of you in the U.K., also an amusing paradox involving the infamous hookah story

10 0.90239275 1216 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-17-Modeling group-level predictors in a multilevel regression

11 0.88494551 2123 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-04-Tesla fires!

12 0.88351554 1161 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-10-If an entire article in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis were put together from other, unacknowledged, sources, would that be a work of art?

13 0.88228399 1964 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-01-Non-topical blogging

14 0.87744677 879 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-29-New journal on causal inference

15 0.87619221 1804 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-15-How effective are football coaches?

16 0.86553848 2167 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-10-Do you believe that “humans and other living things have evolved over time”?

17 0.85608578 2317 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-04-Honored oldsters write about statistics

18 0.84919775 1413 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-11-News flash: Probability and statistics are hard to understand

19 0.8460592 2001 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-29-Edgar Allan Poe was a statistician

20 0.84048176 1984 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-16-BDA at 40% off!