andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-637 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This blog by J. Robert Lennon on abandoned novels made me think of the more general topic of abandoned projects. I seem to recall George V. Higgins writing that he’d written and discarded 14 novels or so before publishing The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I haven’t abandoned any novels but I’ve abandoned lots of research projects (and also have started various projects that there’s no way I’ll finish). If you think about the decisions involved, it really has to be that way. You learn while you’re working on a project whether it’s worth continuing. Sometimes I’ve put in the hard work and pushed a project to completion, published the article, and then I think . . . what was the point? The modal number of citations of our articles is zero, etc.
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7 The modal number of citations of our articles is zero, etc. [sent-12, score-0.418]
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same-blog 1 1.0 637 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-29-Unfinished business
Introduction: This blog by J. Robert Lennon on abandoned novels made me think of the more general topic of abandoned projects. I seem to recall George V. Higgins writing that he’d written and discarded 14 novels or so before publishing The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I haven’t abandoned any novels but I’ve abandoned lots of research projects (and also have started various projects that there’s no way I’ll finish). If you think about the decisions involved, it really has to be that way. You learn while you’re working on a project whether it’s worth continuing. Sometimes I’ve put in the hard work and pushed a project to completion, published the article, and then I think . . . what was the point? The modal number of citations of our articles is zero, etc.
2 0.14877011 1852 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-12-Crime novels for economists
Introduction: Following up on this post by Noah Smith on economics in science fiction, Mark Palko writes on economics in crime fiction. Just as almost all science fiction is ultimately about politics, one could say that just about all crime fiction is about economics. But if I had to pick one crime novelist with an economics focus, I’d pick George V. Higgins. In one of his novels, his character Jerry Kennedy had a riff on the difference between guys who get a salary and guys who have to work for every dollar. But, really, almost all his novels are full of economics.
Introduction: This amusing-yet-so-true video directed by Eléonore Pourriat shows a sex-role-reversed world where women are in charge and men don’t get taken seriously. It’s convincing and affecting, but the twist that interests me comes at the end, when the real world returns. It’s really creepy. And this in turn reminds me of something we discussed here several years ago, the idea that alternative histories are made particularly compelling when they are grounded in the fact that the alternate world is not the real world. Pourriat’s video would have been excellent even without its final scene, but that scene drives the point home in a way that I don’t think would’ve been possible had the video stayed entirely within its artificial world. The point here is that the real world is indeed what is real. This alternative sex-role-reversed world is not actually possible, and what makes it interesting to think about is the contrast to what really is. If you set up an alternative history but you do
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Introduction: J. Robert Lennon writes : At the moment I [Lennon] am simultaneously working on two magazine articles, each requiring me to assess not just a book, but (briefly) a writer’s entire career. The writers in question are both prominent, both widely published, read, and appreciated. And yet neither, I think, enjoys a full appreciation of their career–its real scope, with all its twists and turns, its eccentricities intact. In one case, the writer had one smash hit, and one notorious book everyone hates. In the other, the writer has somehow become known as the author of one really serious book that gets taught a lot in college classes, and a bunch of other stuff generally thought to be a little bit frivolous. But close readings of each (hell, not even that close) reveals these reputations to be woefully inadequate. Both writers are much more interesting than their hits and bombs would suggest. This naturally got me thinking about statisticians. Some statisticians are famous (within
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Introduction: Aki points us to this discussion from Rolf Zwaan: The first massive replication project in psychology has just reached completion (several others are to follow). . . . What can we learn from the ManyLabs project? The results here show the effect sizes for the replication efforts (in green and grey) as well as the original studies (in blue). The 99% confidence intervals are for the meta-analysis of the effect size (the green dots); the studies are ordered by effect size. Let’s first consider what we canNOT learn from these data. Of the 13 replication attempts (when the first four are taken together), 11 succeeded and 2 did not (in fact, at some point ManyLabs suggests that a third one, Imagined Contact also doesn’t really replicate). We cannot learn from this that the vast majority of psychological findings will replicate . . . But even if we had an accurate estimate of the percentage of findings that replicate, how useful would that be? Rather than trying to arrive at a mo
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simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
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Introduction: This blog by J. Robert Lennon on abandoned novels made me think of the more general topic of abandoned projects. I seem to recall George V. Higgins writing that he’d written and discarded 14 novels or so before publishing The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I haven’t abandoned any novels but I’ve abandoned lots of research projects (and also have started various projects that there’s no way I’ll finish). If you think about the decisions involved, it really has to be that way. You learn while you’re working on a project whether it’s worth continuing. Sometimes I’ve put in the hard work and pushed a project to completion, published the article, and then I think . . . what was the point? The modal number of citations of our articles is zero, etc.
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Introduction: In our recent discussion of modes of publication, Joseph Wilson wrote, “The single best reform science can make right now is to decouple publication from career advancement, thereby reducing the number of publications by an order of magnitude and then move to an entirely disjointed, informal, online free-for-all communication system for research results.” My first thought on this was: Sure, yeah, that makes sense. But then I got to thinking: what would it really mean to decouple publication from career advancement? This is too late for me—I’m middle-aged and have no career advancement in my future—but it got me thinking more carefully about the role of publication in the research process, and this seemed worth a blog (the simplest sort of publication available to me). However, somewhere between writing the above paragraphs and writing the blog entry, I forgot exactly what I was going to say! I guess I should’ve just typed it all in then. In the old days I just wouldn’t run this
3 0.75720638 1225 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-22-Procrastination as a positive productivity strategy
Introduction: Reading this amusing book review on willpower by Will Self ( link from Jenny Davidson) reminds me that recently [actually, several months ago; recall that most of this blog is published on a delay], I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. I think that when I write this sort of thing it annoys people, because I’m lucky enough to be in a position to get a lot done—projects ranging from the ethics column to Stan—but I get frustrated when I spend a week trying to work, and then when the week’s over, I realize that all I did was respond to emails, review a bunch of journal submissions and grant proposals, and spend a lot of time staring into space while putting off whatever it was that I really thought I should be doing. I thought and thought, and I decided that my best strategy is what I call positive procrastination . Procrastination is of course typically considered a bad thing (or, as ironic-style writers would write, a Bad Thing). But you can actually use it, ju
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Introduction: I post (approximately) once a day and don’t plan to change that. I have enough material to post more often—for example, I could intersperse existing blog posts with summaries of my published papers or of other work that I like; and, beyond this, we currently have a one-to-two-month backlog of posts—but I’m afraid that if the number of posts were doubled, the attention given to each would be roughly halved. Looking at it the other way, I certainly don’t want to reduce my level of posting. Sure, it takes time to blog, but these are things that are important for me to say. If I were to blog less frequently, it would only be because I was pouring all these words into a different vessel, for example a book. For now, though, I think it makes sense to blog and then collect the words later as appropriate. With blogging I get comments, and many of these comments are helpful—either directly (by pointing out errors in my thinking or linking to relevant software or literature) or indirec
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Introduction: We often hear that at the end of life, people often wish they hadn’t worked so hard. (I’m assuming this is coming from executive types who have the option of working less, not people who had to work hard just to put food on the table.) I don’t understand this. Work is ok, but in almost any moment I much prefer relaxing to working. Nonetheless I often wish I were working harder or had worked harder. I don’t feel that I work too much. So I don’t know what to think. Am I just unusual? Or maybe I already don’t work so hard, so there’s nothing for me to regret? Or—and this is the scary option—maybe right now I wish I were working harder, but in twenty years I’ll regret that I spent so much time working? Here’s one thing. I like almost all the research papers I’ve written, but the vast majority (including some of my favorites) have had very few citations and, I assume, very little impact. So maybe I worked too hard on some of them?
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Introduction: Word count stats from the Google books database prove that Bayesianism is expanding faster than the universe. A n-gram is a tuple of n words.
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Introduction: This blog by J. Robert Lennon on abandoned novels made me think of the more general topic of abandoned projects. I seem to recall George V. Higgins writing that he’d written and discarded 14 novels or so before publishing The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I haven’t abandoned any novels but I’ve abandoned lots of research projects (and also have started various projects that there’s no way I’ll finish). If you think about the decisions involved, it really has to be that way. You learn while you’re working on a project whether it’s worth continuing. Sometimes I’ve put in the hard work and pushed a project to completion, published the article, and then I think . . . what was the point? The modal number of citations of our articles is zero, etc.
3 0.82615596 1186 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-27-Confusion from illusory precision
Introduction: When I posted this link to Dean Foster’s rants, some commenters pointed out this linked claim by famed statistician/provacateur Bjorn Lomberg: If [writes Lomborg] you reduce your child’s intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0.03 grams a day (that’s the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off. Let’s unpack Lomborg’s claim. I don’t know anything about the science of pesticides and cancer, but can he really be so sure that the effects are so small as to be comparable to the health effects of eating “just one apple every 20 years”? I can’t believe you could estimate effects to anything like that precision. I can’t believe anyone has such a precise estimate of the health effects of pesticides, and also I can’t believe anyone has such a precise effect of the health effect of eating an app
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Introduction: I was just thinking about this because we seem to be circling around the same few topics over and over (while occasionally slipping in some new statistical ideas): 10. Wegman 9. Hipmunk 8. Dennis the dentist 7. Freakonomics 6. The difference between significant and non-significant is not itself statistically significant 5. Just use a hierarchical model already! 4. Innumerate journalists who think that presidential elections are just like high school 3. A graph can be pretty but convey essentially no information 2. Stan is coming 1. Clippy! Did I miss anything important?
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Introduction: Stan: open-source Bayesian inference Speaker: Andrew Gelman, Columbia University Date: Thursday, October 11 2012 Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM Location: 32-D507 Host: Polina Golland, CSAIL Contact: Polina Golland, 6172538005, polina@csail.mit.edu Stan ( mc-stan.org ) is an open-source package for obtaining Bayesian inference using the No-U-Turn sampler, a variant of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. We discuss how Stan works and what it can do, the problems that motivated us to write Stan, current challenges, and areas of planned development, including tools for improved generality and usability, more efficient sampling algorithms, and fuller integration of model building, model checking, and model understanding in Bayesian data analysis. P.S. Here’s the talk .
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