andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-621 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I followed the link of commenter “Epanechnikov” to his blog, where I found, among other things, an uncritical discussion of Richard von Mises’s book, “Probability, Statistics and Truth.” The bad news is that, based on the evidence of his book, Mises didn’t seem to understand basic ideas of statistical significance. See here, Or at the very least, he was grossly overconfident (which can perhaps be seen from the brash title of his book). This is not the fault of “Epanechnikov,” but I just thought that people should be careful about taking too seriously the statistical philosophy of someone who didn’t think to do a chi-squared test when it was called for. (This is not a Bayesian/non-Bayesian thing; it’s just basic statistics.)
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1 I followed the link of commenter “Epanechnikov” to his blog, where I found, among other things, an uncritical discussion of Richard von Mises’s book, “Probability, Statistics and Truth. [sent-1, score-0.859]
2 ” The bad news is that, based on the evidence of his book, Mises didn’t seem to understand basic ideas of statistical significance. [sent-2, score-0.801]
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4 This is not the fault of “Epanechnikov,” but I just thought that people should be careful about taking too seriously the statistical philosophy of someone who didn’t think to do a chi-squared test when it was called for. [sent-4, score-1.053]
5 (This is not a Bayesian/non-Bayesian thing; it’s just basic statistics. [sent-5, score-0.196]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 621 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-20-Maybe a great idea in theory, didn’t work so well in practice
Introduction: I followed the link of commenter “Epanechnikov” to his blog, where I found, among other things, an uncritical discussion of Richard von Mises’s book, “Probability, Statistics and Truth.” The bad news is that, based on the evidence of his book, Mises didn’t seem to understand basic ideas of statistical significance. See here, Or at the very least, he was grossly overconfident (which can perhaps be seen from the brash title of his book). This is not the fault of “Epanechnikov,” but I just thought that people should be careful about taking too seriously the statistical philosophy of someone who didn’t think to do a chi-squared test when it was called for. (This is not a Bayesian/non-Bayesian thing; it’s just basic statistics.)
2 0.16341922 1023 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-22-Going Beyond the Book: Towards Critical Reading in Statistics Teaching
Introduction: My article with the above title is appearing in the journal Teaching Statistics. Here’s the introduction: We can improve our teaching of statistical examples from books by collecting further data, reading cited articles and performing further data analysis. This should not come as a surprise, but what might be new is the realization of how close to the surface these research opportunities are: even influential and celebrated books can have examples where more can be learned with a small amount of additional effort. We discuss three examples that have arisen in our own teaching: an introductory textbook that motivated us to think more carefully about categorical and continuous variables; a book for the lay reader that misreported a study of menstruation and accidents; and a monograph on the foundations of probability that over interpreted statistically insignificant fluctuations in sex ratios. And here’s the conclusion: Individually, these examples are of little importance.
3 0.083197251 1719 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-11-Why waste time philosophizing?
Introduction: I’ll answer the above question after first sharing some background and history on the the philosophy of Bayesian statistics, which appeared at the end of our rejoinder to the discussion to which I linked the other day: When we were beginning our statistical educations, the word ‘Bayesian’ conveyed membership in an obscure cult. Statisticians who were outside the charmed circle could ignore the Bayesian subfield, while Bayesians themselves tended to be either apologetic or brazenly defiant. These two extremes manifested themselves in ever more elaborate proposals for non-informative priors, on the one hand, and declarations of the purity of subjective probability, on the other. Much has changed in the past 30 years. ‘Bayesian’ is now often used in casual scientific parlance as a synonym for ‘rational’, the anti-Bayesians have mostly disappeared, and non-Bayesian statisticians feel the need to keep up with developments in Bayesian modelling and computation. Bayesians themselves
4 0.081713937 1642 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-28-New book by Stef van Buuren on missing-data imputation looks really good!
Introduction: Ben points us to a new book, Flexible Imputation of Missing Data . It’s excellent and I highly recommend it. Definitely worth the $89.95. Van Buuren’s book is great even if you don’t end up using the algorithm described in the book (I actually like their approach but I do think there are some limitations with their particular implementation, which is one reason we’re developing our own package ); he supplies lots of intuition, examples, and graphs. P.S. Stef’s book features an introduction by Don Rubin, which gets me thinking: if Don can find the time to write an introduction to somebody else’s book, he surely should be willing to read and comment on the third edition of his own book, no?
Introduction: My friend Seth, whom I know from Berkeley (we taught a course together on left-handedness), has a blog on topics ranging from thoughtful discussions of scientific evidence, to experiences with his unconventional weight-loss scheme, offbeat self-experimentation, and advocacy of fringe scientific theories, leavened with occasional dollops of cynicism and political extremism . I agree with Seth on some things but not others. ( Here’s Seth’s reason for not attempting a clinical trial of his diet.) Recently I was disturbed (but, I’m sorry to say, not surprised) to see Seth post the following: Predictions of climate models versus reality . I [Seth] have only seen careful prediction-vs-reality comparisons made by AGW [anthropogenic global warming] skeptics. Those who believe humans are dangerously warming the planet appear to be silent on this subject. In response, Phil commented : Funny, on the day you [Seth] made your post saying that you haven’t seen comparis
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same-blog 1 0.97560012 621 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-20-Maybe a great idea in theory, didn’t work so well in practice
Introduction: I followed the link of commenter “Epanechnikov” to his blog, where I found, among other things, an uncritical discussion of Richard von Mises’s book, “Probability, Statistics and Truth.” The bad news is that, based on the evidence of his book, Mises didn’t seem to understand basic ideas of statistical significance. See here, Or at the very least, he was grossly overconfident (which can perhaps be seen from the brash title of his book). This is not the fault of “Epanechnikov,” but I just thought that people should be careful about taking too seriously the statistical philosophy of someone who didn’t think to do a chi-squared test when it was called for. (This is not a Bayesian/non-Bayesian thing; it’s just basic statistics.)
2 0.79508603 57 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-29-Roth and Amsterdam
Introduction: I used to think that fiction is about making up stories, but in recent years I’ve decided that fiction is really more of a method of telling true stories. One thing fiction allows you to do is explore what-if scenarios. I recently read two books that made me think about this: The Counterlife by Philip Roth and Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam. Both books are explicitly about contingencies and possibilities: Roth’s tells a sequence of related but contradictory stories involving his Philip Roth-like (of course) protagonist, and Amsterdam’s is based on an alternative present/future. (I picture Amsterdam’s book as being set in Australia, but maybe I’m just imagining this based on my knowledge that the book was written and published in that country.) I found both books fascinating, partly because of the characters’ voices but especially because they both seemed to exemplify George Box’s dictum that to understand a system you have to perturb it. So, yes, literature an
3 0.79398221 1021 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-21-Don’t judge a book by its title
Introduction: A correspondent writes: I just want to spend a few words to point you to this book I have just found on Amazon: “Understanding The New Statistics: Effect Sizes, Confidence Intervals, and Meta-Analysis” by G. Cumming. I have been attracted by the rather unusual and ‘sexy’ title but it seems to be nothing more than an attempt at alerting the psychology community on considering point estimation procedures and confidence intervals, in place of hypothesis testing, the latter being ‘a terrible idea!’ in the author’s own words. Some more quotes here . Then he says: “‘These are hardly new techniques, but I label them ‘The New Statistics’ because using them would for many researchers be quite new, as well as a highly beneficial change!’” Of course the latter is not stated on the book cover. That’s about as bad as writing a book with subtitle, “Why Americans vote the way they do,” but not actually telling the reader why Americans vote the way they do. I guess what I’m saying is:
4 0.78023583 258 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-05-A review of a review of a review of a decade
Introduction: At the sister blog, David Frum writes , of a book by historian Laura Kalman about the politics of the 1970s: As a work of history about the Ford and Carter years, there is nothing seriously wrong with it. The facts are accurate, the writing is clear and the point of view is not tendentious. Once upon a time, such a book might have been useful to somebody. But the question it raises–and it’s not a question about this book alone–is: What’s the point of this kind of history in the age of the Internet? Suppose I’m an undergraduate who stumbles for the first time across the phrase “Proposition 13.” I could, if I were minded, walk over to the university library, pull this book from the shelf and flip to the index. Or I could save myself two hours and Google it. I wouldn’t learn more from a Google search than I’d learn in these pages. But I wouldn’t learn a whole lot less either. As a textbook writer, I think about some of these issues too! I have two things to add to Frum’s rem
5 0.76475489 432 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-27-Neumann update
Introduction: Steve Hsu, who started off this discussion, had some comments on my speculations on the personality of John von Neumann and others. Steve writes: I [Hsu] actually knew Feynman a bit when I was an undergrad, and found him to be very nice to students. Since then I have heard quite a few stories from people in theoretical physics which emphasize his nastier side, and I think in the end he was quite a complicated person like everyone else. There are a couple of pseudo-biographies of vN, but none as high quality as, e.g., Gleick’s book on Feynman or Hodges book about Turing. (Gleick studied physics as an undergrad at Harvard, and Hodges is a PhD in mathematical physics — pretty rare backgrounds for biographers!) For example, as mentioned on the comment thread to your post, Steve Heims wrote a book about both vN and Wiener (!), and Norman Macrae wrote a biography of vN. Both books are worth reading, but I think neither really do him justice. The breadth of vN’s work is just too m
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Introduction: As we said in Red State, Blue State, it’s not the Prius vs. the pickup truck, it’s the Prius vs. the Hummer. Here’s the graph: Or, as Ross Douthat put it in an op-ed yesterday: This means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club. Our main motivation for doing this work was to change how the news media think about America’s political divisions, and so it’s good to see our ideas getting mainstreamed and moving toward conventional wisdom. P.S. Here’s the time series of graphs showing how the pattern that we and Douthat noticed, of a battle between coastal states and middle America that is occurring among upper-income Americans, is relatively recent, having arisen in the Clinton ye
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Introduction: I followed the link of commenter “Epanechnikov” to his blog, where I found, among other things, an uncritical discussion of Richard von Mises’s book, “Probability, Statistics and Truth.” The bad news is that, based on the evidence of his book, Mises didn’t seem to understand basic ideas of statistical significance. See here, Or at the very least, he was grossly overconfident (which can perhaps be seen from the brash title of his book). This is not the fault of “Epanechnikov,” but I just thought that people should be careful about taking too seriously the statistical philosophy of someone who didn’t think to do a chi-squared test when it was called for. (This is not a Bayesian/non-Bayesian thing; it’s just basic statistics.)
3 0.86613172 718 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-18-Should kids be able to bring their own lunches to school?
Introduction: I encountered this news article , “Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home”: At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. . . . students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria. . . . Such discussions over school lunches and healthy eating echo a larger national debate about the role government should play in individual food choices. “This is such a fundamental infringement on parental responsibility,” said J. Justin Wilson, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Center for Consumer Freedom, which is partially funded by the food industry. . . . For many CPS parents, the idea of forbidding home-packed lunches would be unthinkable. . . . If I had read this two years ago, I’d be at one with J. Justin Wilson and the outraged kids and parents. But last year we spent a sabbatical in Paris, where . . . kids aren’t allowed to bring
4 0.85217488 698 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-05-Shocking but not surprising
Introduction: Much-honored playwright Tony Kushner was set to receive one more honor–a degree from John Jay College–but it was suddenly taken away from him on an 11-1 vote of the trustees of the City University of New York. This was the first rejection of an honorary degree nomination since 1961. The news article focuses on one trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime political aide, who opposed Kushner’s honorary degree, but to me the relevant point is that the committee as a whole voted 11-1 to ding him. Kusnher said, “I’m sickened,” he added, “that this is happening in New York City. Shocked, really.” I can see why he’s shocked, but perhaps it’s not so surprising that it’s happening in NYC. Recall the famous incident from 1940 in which Bertrand Russell was invited and then uninvited to teach at City College. The problem that time was Russell’s views on free love (as they called it back then). There seems to be a long tradition of city college officials being will
5 0.82677484 969 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-22-Researching the cost-effectiveness of political lobbying organisations
Introduction: Sally Murray from Giving What We Can writes: We are an organisation that assesses different charitable (/fundable) interventions, to estimate which are the most cost-effective (measured in terms of the improvement of life for people in developing countries gained for every dollar invested). Our research guides and encourages greater donations to the most cost-effective charities we thus identify, and our members have so far pledged a total of $14m to these causes, with many hundreds more relying on our advice in a less formal way. I am specifically researching the cost-effectiveness of political lobbying organisations. We are initially focusing on organisations that lobby for ‘big win’ outcomes such as increased funding of the most cost-effective NTD treatments/ vaccine research, changes to global trade rules (potentially) and more obscure lobbies such as “Keep Antibiotics Working”. We’ve a great deal of respect for your work and the superbly rational way you go about it, and
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