andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-532 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I was talking with someone the other day about the book by that Yale law professor who called her kids “garbage” and didn’t let them go to the bathroom when they were studying piano . . . apparently it wasn’t so bad as all that, she was misrepresented by the Wall Street Journal excerpt: “I was very surprised,” she says. “The Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they’d put that kind of a title on it. . . . “And while it’s ultimately my responsibility — my strict Chinese mom told me ‘never blame other people for your problems!’ — the one-sided nature of the excerpt has really led to some major misconceptions about what the book says, and about what I really believe.” I don’t completely follow her reasoning here: just because, many years ago, her mother told her a slogan about not blaming other people, therefore she can say, “it’s ultimately my responsibility”? You can see the illogic of this by flipping it around. Wha
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1 “And while it’s ultimately my responsibility — my strict Chinese mom told me ‘never blame other people for your problems! [sent-10, score-0.37]
2 ’ — the one-sided nature of the excerpt has really led to some major misconceptions about what the book says, and about what I really believe. [sent-11, score-0.372]
3 ” I don’t completely follow her reasoning here: just because, many years ago, her mother told her a slogan about not blaming other people, therefore she can say, “it’s ultimately my responsibility”? [sent-12, score-0.576]
4 What if her mother had told her that nothing is really your fault, everything you do is a product of what came before you, etc. [sent-14, score-0.328]
5 What I really want to say here is that I find completely plausible the claim that the Wall Street Journal sensationalized her book. [sent-18, score-0.381]
6 My story I’ve always thought of the WSJ as a completely sobersided newspaper, duller than dull. [sent-20, score-0.121]
7 Anyway, about six months ago I received the following email from a Wall Street Journal editor: I read your post on college admissions a while back – proposals to level the playing field by deducting points for various things, like SAT prep. [sent-24, score-0.49]
8 Do you think you might be able to do a piece on that – at around 1,800 words – possibly to run in the Saturday Wall Street Journal? [sent-25, score-0.257]
9 ) I didn’t really need the $1 a word, but of course I leapt at the opportunity to reach an audience that is much larger than this feeble little blog. [sent-28, score-0.162]
10 And I didn’t want to be like John Yoo and just write false stuff. [sent-33, score-0.175]
11 I’m still recovering from that false theorem I published nearly twenty years ago! [sent-35, score-0.148]
12 To which I was told, We don’t really do co-authored pieces in our section. [sent-37, score-0.176]
13 And I wrote something, running it by several actual experts and altering it until it seemed completely reasonable. [sent-40, score-0.186]
14 I bugged them a couple times and they put me off, finally they said they wouldn’t run it. [sent-43, score-0.165]
15 I did get $450 as a kill fee, though, which was cool–I’d never received a kill fee before. [sent-44, score-0.414]
16 It seemed strange to me–after all, it’s not like I was shopping this piece around. [sent-46, score-0.153]
17 My original blog on college admissions was a shoot-from-the-hip kind of thing (check out the long comment thread), whereas the article I sent to the Journal was much more reasonable in tone (while being very similar in substance). [sent-50, score-0.27]
18 They want to run controversial pieces that get talked about (possibly by offending people). [sent-52, score-0.544]
19 well, I like being talked about too, but I don’t want to say things that are stupid or false. [sent-56, score-0.27]
20 I can spew out my speculations hen writing on this blog to readers who know where I’m coming from, but when going for a wider audience, I want to be more careful so I’m not misunderstood. [sent-57, score-0.1]
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Introduction: I was talking with someone the other day about the book by that Yale law professor who called her kids “garbage” and didn’t let them go to the bathroom when they were studying piano . . . apparently it wasn’t so bad as all that, she was misrepresented by the Wall Street Journal excerpt: “I was very surprised,” she says. “The Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they’d put that kind of a title on it. . . . “And while it’s ultimately my responsibility — my strict Chinese mom told me ‘never blame other people for your problems!’ — the one-sided nature of the excerpt has really led to some major misconceptions about what the book says, and about what I really believe.” I don’t completely follow her reasoning here: just because, many years ago, her mother told her a slogan about not blaming other people, therefore she can say, “it’s ultimately my responsibility”? You can see the illogic of this by flipping it around. Wha
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Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal writes: I’m working on a column this week about numerical/statistical tips and resolutions for writers and people in other fields in the new year. 2013 is the International Year of Statistics, so I’d like to offer some ways to better grapple with statistics in the year ahead. Here’s where you come in. If you have time in the next couple of days, please send me an idea or three about what people often do incorrectly when it comes to numbers, and how they could do better, without making things much more complicated. Maybe with an example of something you’ve seen that rubbed you the wrong way, and how you’d fix it. Bonus if you can tie it in to some sort of statistic that will be particularly relevant in 2013. Any ideas of yours I use, I’ll credit, of course. Examples of what I have in mind: –Don’t report on how ubiquitous or important something is by saying there are 130,000 Google search results for it. Or if you do, at least check that yo
Introduction: The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), and I was thinking a bit more about why I was so bothered that it was published in Psychological Science, which I’d thought of as a serious research journal. My concern isn’t just that that the paper is bad—after all, lots of bad papers get published—but rather that it had nothing really going for it, except that it was headline bait. It was a survey done on Mechanical Turk, that’s it. No clever design, no clever questions, no care in dealing with nonresponse problems, no innovative data analysis, no nothing. The paper had nothing to offer, except that it had no obvious flaws. Psychology is a huge field full of brilliant researchers.
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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
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Introduction: I was talking with someone the other day about the book by that Yale law professor who called her kids “garbage” and didn’t let them go to the bathroom when they were studying piano . . . apparently it wasn’t so bad as all that, she was misrepresented by the Wall Street Journal excerpt: “I was very surprised,” she says. “The Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they’d put that kind of a title on it. . . . “And while it’s ultimately my responsibility — my strict Chinese mom told me ‘never blame other people for your problems!’ — the one-sided nature of the excerpt has really led to some major misconceptions about what the book says, and about what I really believe.” I don’t completely follow her reasoning here: just because, many years ago, her mother told her a slogan about not blaming other people, therefore she can say, “it’s ultimately my responsibility”? You can see the illogic of this by flipping it around. Wha
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Introduction: Andrew Anthony tells the excellent story of how Nick Brown, Alan Sokal, and Harris Friedman shot down some particularly silly work in psychology. (“According to the graph, it all came down to a specific ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions. If your ratio was greater than 2.9013 positive emotions to 1 negative emotion you were flourishing in life. If your ratio was less than that number you were languishing.” And, yes, the work they were shooting down really is that bad.) If you want to see what the fuss is about, just google “2.9013.” Here’s an example (from 2012) of an uncritical reporting of the claim, here’s another one from 2010, here’s one from 2011 . . . well, you get the idea. And here’s a quick summary posted by Rolf Zwaan after Brown et al. came out with their paper. I know Sokal and Brown and so this story was not news to me. I didn’t post anything about it on this blog because it seemed like it was getting enough coverage elsewhere. I think Ni
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Introduction: Our research assistants have unearthed the following guest column by H. L. Mencken which appeared in the New York Times of 5 Nov 1933, the date at which Prohibition ended in the United States. As a public service we are reprinting it here. I’m particularly impressed at how the Sage of Baltimore buttressed his article with references to the latest scientific literature of the time. I think you’ll all agree that Mencken’s column, in which he took a stand against the legality of alcohol consumption, has contemporary relevance , more than 80 years later. Because of the challenge of interpreting decades-old references, we have asked a leading scholar of Mencken’s writings to add notes where appropriate, to clarify any points of confusion. And now here’s Mencken’s column (with notes added in brackets), in its entirety: For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I drank alcohol. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of
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Introduction: I was talking with someone the other day about the book by that Yale law professor who called her kids “garbage” and didn’t let them go to the bathroom when they were studying piano . . . apparently it wasn’t so bad as all that, she was misrepresented by the Wall Street Journal excerpt: “I was very surprised,” she says. “The Journal basically strung together the most controversial sections of the book. And I had no idea they’d put that kind of a title on it. . . . “And while it’s ultimately my responsibility — my strict Chinese mom told me ‘never blame other people for your problems!’ — the one-sided nature of the excerpt has really led to some major misconceptions about what the book says, and about what I really believe.” I don’t completely follow her reasoning here: just because, many years ago, her mother told her a slogan about not blaming other people, therefore she can say, “it’s ultimately my responsibility”? You can see the illogic of this by flipping it around. Wha
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Introduction: This blog is threatening to turn into Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, Social Science, and Literature Criticism, but I’m just going to go with the conversational flow, so here’s another post about an essayist. I’m not a big fan of Janet Malcolm’s essays — and I don’t mean I don’t like her attitude or her pro-murderer attitude, I mean I don’t like them all that much as writing. They’re fine, I read them, they don’t bore me, but I certainly don’t think she’s “our” best essayist. But that’s not a debate I want to have right now, and if I did I’m quite sure most of you wouldn’t want to read it anyway. So instead, I’ll just say something about John McPhee. As all right-thinking people agree, in McPhee’s long career he has written two kinds of books: good, short books, and bad, long books. (He has also written many New Yorker essays, and perhaps other essays for other magazines too; most of these are good, although I haven’t seen any really good recent work from him, and so
Introduction: Joe Blitzstein and Xiao-Li Meng write : An e ffectively designed examination process goes far beyond revealing students’ knowledge or skills. It also serves as a great teaching and learning tool, incentivizing the students to think more deeply and to connect the dots at a higher level. This extends throughout the entire process: pre-exam preparation, the exam itself, and the post-exam period (the aftermath or, more appropriately, afterstat of the exam). As in the publication process, the first submission is essential but still just one piece in the dialogue. Viewing the entire exam process as an extended dialogue between students and faculty, we discuss ideas for making this dialogue induce more inspiration than perspiration, and thereby making it a memorable deep-learning triumph rather than a wish-to-forget test-taking trauma. We illustrate such a dialogue through a recently introduced course in the Harvard Statistics Department, Stat 399: Problem Solving in Statistics, and tw
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