andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-504 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: I’ll be on Radio 4 at 8.40am, on the BBC show “Today,” talking about The Honest Rainmaker . I have no idea how the interview went (it was about 5 minutes), but I’m kicking myself because I was planning to tell the hookah story, but I forgot. Here it is: I was at a panel for the National Institutes of Health evaluating grants. One of the proposals had to do with the study of the effect of water-pipe smoking, the hookah. There was a discussion around the table. The NIH is a United States government organisation; not many people in the US really smoke hookahs; so should we fund it? Someone said, ‘Well actually it’s becoming more popular among the young.’ And if younger people smoke it, they have a longer lifetime exposure, and apparently there is some evidence that the dose you get of carcinogens from hookah smoking might be 20 times the dose of smoking a cigarette. I don’t know the details of the math, but it was a lot. So even if not many people do it, if you multiply the risk, yo
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 I have no idea how the interview went (it was about 5 minutes), but I’m kicking myself because I was planning to tell the hookah story, but I forgot. [sent-3, score-0.67]
2 The NIH is a United States government organisation; not many people in the US really smoke hookahs; so should we fund it? [sent-7, score-0.238]
3 ’ And if younger people smoke it, they have a longer lifetime exposure, and apparently there is some evidence that the dose you get of carcinogens from hookah smoking might be 20 times the dose of smoking a cigarette. [sent-9, score-1.85]
4 So even if not many people do it, if you multiply the risk, you get a lot of lung cancer. [sent-11, score-0.34]
5 Then someone at the table – and I couldn’t believe this – said, ‘My uncle smoked a hookah pipe all his life, and he lived until he was 90 years old. [sent-12, score-0.66]
6 ’ And I had a sudden flash of insight, which was this. [sent-13, score-0.178]
7 Suppose you have something that actually kills half the people. [sent-14, score-0.093]
8 Even if you’re a heavy smoker, your chance of dying of lung cancer is not 50 per cent, so therefore, even with something as extreme as smoking and lung cancer, you still have lots of cases where people don’t die of the disease. [sent-15, score-1.073]
9 The evidence is certainly all around you pointing in the wrong direction – if you’re willing to accept anecdotal evidence – there’s always going to be an unlimited amount of evidence which won’t tell you anything. [sent-16, score-1.377]
10 It makes you realise that we need institutions that protect us from ourselves. [sent-18, score-0.176]
11 I think that last bit–” if you’re willing to accept anecdotal evidence, there’s always going to be an unlimited amount of evidence which won’t tell you anything. [sent-19, score-0.983]
12 ” Of course, what makes this story work so well is that it’s backed up by a personal anecdote! [sent-20, score-0.16]
13 Next time I do radio, I’m gonna bring an index card with my key point. [sent-23, score-0.227]
14 Not my 5 key points, not my 3 key points, but my 1 key point. [sent-24, score-0.462]
15 Actually, I’m gonna be on the radio (in Seattle) next Monday afternoon, so I’ll have a chance to try this plan then. [sent-25, score-0.305]
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Introduction: I’ll be on Radio 4 at 8.40am, on the BBC show “Today,” talking about The Honest Rainmaker . I have no idea how the interview went (it was about 5 minutes), but I’m kicking myself because I was planning to tell the hookah story, but I forgot. Here it is: I was at a panel for the National Institutes of Health evaluating grants. One of the proposals had to do with the study of the effect of water-pipe smoking, the hookah. There was a discussion around the table. The NIH is a United States government organisation; not many people in the US really smoke hookahs; so should we fund it? Someone said, ‘Well actually it’s becoming more popular among the young.’ And if younger people smoke it, they have a longer lifetime exposure, and apparently there is some evidence that the dose you get of carcinogens from hookah smoking might be 20 times the dose of smoking a cigarette. I don’t know the details of the math, but it was a lot. So even if not many people do it, if you multiply the risk, yo
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Introduction: The (U.S.) “President’s Cancer Panel” has released its 2008-2009 annual report, which includes a cover letter that says “the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.” The report itself discusses exposures to various types of industrial chemicals, some of which are known carcinogens, in some detail, but gives nearly no data or analysis to suggest that these exposures are contributing to significant numbers of cancers. In fact, there is pretty good evidence that they are not. The plot above shows age-adjusted cancer mortality for men, by cancer type, in the U.S. The plot below shows the same for women. In both cases, the cancers with the highest mortality rates are shown, but not all cancers (e.g. brain cancer is not shown). For what it’s worth, I’m not sure how trustworthy the rates are from the 1930s — it seems possible that reporting, autopsies, or both, were less careful during the Great Depression — so I suggest focusing on the r
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Introduction: After our discussion of the sad case of Darrell Huff, the celebrated “How to Lie with Statistics” guy who had a lucrative side career disparaging the link between smoking and cancer, I was motivated to follow John Mashey’s recommendation and read the book, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, by historian Robert Proctor. My first stop upon receiving the book was the index, in particular the entry for Rubin, Donald B. I followed the reference to pages 440-442 and found the description of Don’s activities to be accurate, neither diminished nor overstated, to the best of my knowledge. Rubin is the second-most-famous statistician to have been paid by the cigarette industry, but several other big and small names have been on the payroll at one time or another. Here’s a partial list . Just including the people I know or have heard of: Herbert Solomon, Stanford Richard Tweedie, Bond U Arnold Zellner, U of Chicago Paul Switzer, S
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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
Introduction: Thomas Lumley writes : The Herald has a story about hazards of coffee. The picture caption says Men who drink more than four cups a day are 56 per cent more likely to die. which is obviously not true: deaths, as we’ve observed before, are fixed at one per customer. The story says It’s not that people are dying at a rapid rate. But men who drink more than four cups a day are 56 per cent more likely to die and women have double the chance compared with moderate drinkers, according to the The University of Queensland and the University of South Carolina study. What the study actually reported was rates of death: over an average of 17 years, men who drink more than four cups a day died at about a 21% higher rate, with little evidence of any difference in men. After they considered only men and women under 55 (which they don’t say was something they had planned to do), and attempted to control for a whole bunch of other factors, the rate increase went to 56% for me
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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.
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Introduction: I had a submission a couple years ago that was rejected by a journal. One of the reviewers began with the following snotty aside: In this manuscript Gelman and Shalizi (there’s no anonymity here; this thing has been floating around the web for some time) . . . Actually, we posted it on the same day we submitted it to the journal. But double-blindness allowed the reviewer to act as if we had done something wrong! And, even if it had been “floating around the web for some time,” that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps it just meant that the article had previously been rejected by a bad-attitude reviewer!
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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!
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