andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-641 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: As many of you know, this blog is on an approximate one-month delay. I schedule my posts to appear roughly once a day, and there’s currently a backlog of about 20 or 30 posts. Recently I’ve decided to spend less time blogging, but I have some ideas I’d still like to share. To tweet, if you will. So I thought I’d just put a bunch of ideas out there that interested readers could follow up on. Think of it like one of those old-style dot-dot-dot newspaper columns. - One thing statisticians could learn from economists: if you want to control for a continuous variable, throw it in as a fifth-order polynomial on the right hand side of a regression. A lot of statisticians will either do simple linear or else spaz out with a spline. But good old polynomials are fine. - One thing that not so many political scientists realize is that nowadays the rich voters are Democrats! You don’t always see that in surveys, but remember that survey nonresponse rates are typically 80%+. Heck,
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Heck, surveys will tell you that 108% of people in Arizona have an opinion about their governor. [sent-12, score-0.247]
2 Don’t get fooled by surveys, go with the pundits you can trust. [sent-14, score-0.085]
3 - ESP is real, and don’t listen to any curmudgeons who tell you otherwise. [sent-18, score-0.106]
4 Any day now they’re gonna do the big replication that demonstrates it beyond a shadow of a doubt. [sent-19, score-0.468]
5 - Figure 1 demonstrates that test scores have been largely constant over the past thirty years. [sent-21, score-0.13]
6 Especially if you print Figure 1 really small, on a really big piece of paper with really big margins. [sent-22, score-0.25]
7 I’d tell you more about this one but I don’t want anybody to get hurt. [sent-27, score-0.106]
8 - Anyone who refers to Justice Kennedy as “Tony” is probably a trustworthy judge of character. [sent-28, score-0.085]
9 - I wasn’t plagiarizing, I was just copying big blocks of text from others’ writings without attribution. [sent-29, score-0.125]
10 - Lou Dobbs built his daughter’s horse farm with his own two all-American hands. [sent-30, score-0.089]
11 - Hey–did you know that it’s evolutionarily advantageous for tall heavy engineers to have daughters . [sent-31, score-0.094]
12 - You don’t have to be a patent troll to know that ice melts on a sunny day because of its amazing albedo. [sent-43, score-0.382]
13 sometime around 1995, the Soviet Union finally surpassed the U. [sent-48, score-0.085]
14 - While you weren’t looking, they raised the marginal tax rate to 93%. [sent-54, score-0.214]
15 And it my accountant increases his fees one more bit, the marginal rate will probably go over 100%. [sent-55, score-0.447]
16 Thrown in user fees, parking tickets, and country club memberships and we’re creeping up to 200%, maybe 250. [sent-56, score-0.094]
17 - Meanwhile, the current unemployment rate of 6. [sent-61, score-0.111]
18 Really, don’t worry–experts assure us we can chill out! [sent-63, score-0.085]
19 If I don’t cut my hair soon, they’ll kick me out of nursery school. [sent-67, score-0.153]
20 And, hey, don’t forget to save those bonus points–you’ll be eligible for big prizes! [sent-71, score-0.348]
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Introduction: As many of you know, this blog is on an approximate one-month delay. I schedule my posts to appear roughly once a day, and there’s currently a backlog of about 20 or 30 posts. Recently I’ve decided to spend less time blogging, but I have some ideas I’d still like to share. To tweet, if you will. So I thought I’d just put a bunch of ideas out there that interested readers could follow up on. Think of it like one of those old-style dot-dot-dot newspaper columns. - One thing statisticians could learn from economists: if you want to control for a continuous variable, throw it in as a fifth-order polynomial on the right hand side of a regression. A lot of statisticians will either do simple linear or else spaz out with a spline. But good old polynomials are fine. - One thing that not so many political scientists realize is that nowadays the rich voters are Democrats! You don’t always see that in surveys, but remember that survey nonresponse rates are typically 80%+. Heck,
2 0.13725807 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
3 0.13409239 28 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-12-Alert: Incompetent colleague wastes time of hardworking Wolfram Research publicist
Introduction: Marty McKee at Wolfram Research appears to have a very very stupid colleague. McKee wrote to Christian Robert: Your article, “Evidence and Evolution: A review”, caught the attention of one of my colleagues, who thought that it could be developed into an interesting Demonstration to add to the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. As Christian points out, adapting his book review into a computer demonstration would be quite a feat! I wonder what McKee’s colleague could be thinking? I recommend that Wolfram fire McKee’s colleague immediately: what an idiot! P.S. I’m not actually sure that McKee was the author of this email; I’m guessing this was the case because this other very similar email was written under his name. P.P.S. To head off the inevitable comments: Yes, yes, I know this is no big deal and I shouldn’t get bent out of shape about it. But . . . Wolfram Research has contributed such great things to the world, that I hate to think of them wasting any money paying
4 0.12075171 2232 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-03-What is the appropriate time scale for blogging—the day or the week?
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: This came in the spam the other day: College Station, TX–August 16, 2010–Change and hope were central themes to the November 2008 U.S. presidential election. A new longitudinal study published in the September issue of Social Science Quarterly analyzes suicide rates at a state level from 1981ï¼2005 and determines that presidential election outcomes directly influence suicide rates among voters. In states where the majority of voters supported the national election winner suicide rates decreased. However, counter-intuitively, suicide rates decreased even more dramatically in states where the majority of voters supported the election loser (4.6 percent lower for males and 5.3 lower for females). This article is the first in its field to focus on candidate and state-specific outcomes in relation to suicide rates. Prior research on this topic focused on whether the election process itself influenced suicide rates, and found that suicide rates fell during the election season. Ric
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Introduction: As many of you know, this blog is on an approximate one-month delay. I schedule my posts to appear roughly once a day, and there’s currently a backlog of about 20 or 30 posts. Recently I’ve decided to spend less time blogging, but I have some ideas I’d still like to share. To tweet, if you will. So I thought I’d just put a bunch of ideas out there that interested readers could follow up on. Think of it like one of those old-style dot-dot-dot newspaper columns. - One thing statisticians could learn from economists: if you want to control for a continuous variable, throw it in as a fifth-order polynomial on the right hand side of a regression. A lot of statisticians will either do simple linear or else spaz out with a spline. But good old polynomials are fine. - One thing that not so many political scientists realize is that nowadays the rich voters are Democrats! You don’t always see that in surveys, but remember that survey nonresponse rates are typically 80%+. Heck,
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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 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
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Introduction: A couple things in this interview by Andrew Goldman of Larry Summers currently irritated me. I’ll give the quotes and then explain my annoyance. 1. Goldman: What would the economy look like now if $1.2 trillion had been spent? Summers: I think it’s an artificial question because there would have been all kinds of problems in actually moving $1.2 trillion dollars through the system — finding enough bridge projects that were ready to go and the like. But the recovery probably would have proceeded more rapidly if the fiscal program had been larger. . . . 2. Goldman: You’re aware of — and were making light of — the fact that you occasionally rub people the wrong way. Summers: In meetings, I’m more focused on trying to figure out what the right answer is than making everybody feel validated. In Washington and at Harvard, that sometimes rubs people the wrong way. OK, now my reactions: 1. Not enough bridge projects, huh? I don’t believe it. We’ve been hearing fo
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Introduction: Statisticians are literalists. When someone says that the U.K. boundary commission’s delay in redistricting gave the Tories an advantage equivalent to 10 percent of the vote, we’re the kind of person who looks it up and claims that the effect is less than 0.7 percent. When someone says, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm,” we’re like, Hey, really? And we go look that one up too. And when someone says that engineers have more sons and nurses have more daughters . . . well, let’s not go there. So, when I was pointed to this blog by Michael O’Hare making the following claim, in the context of K-12 education in the United States: My [O'Hare's] favorite examples of this junk [educational content with no workplace value] are spelling and pencil-and-paper algorithm arithmetic. These are absolutely critical for a clerk
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Introduction: Lets say you are repeatedly going to recieve unselected sets of well done RCTs on various say medical treatments. One reasonable assumption with all of these treatments is that they are monotonic – either helpful or harmful for all. The treatment effect will (as always) vary for subgroups in the population – these will not be explicitly identified in the studies – but each study very likely will enroll different percentages of the variuos patient subgroups. Being all randomized studies these subgroups will be balanced in the treatment versus control arms – but each study will (as always) be estimating a different – but exchangeable – treatment effect (Exhangeable due to the ignorance about the subgroup memberships of the enrolled patients.) That reasonable assumption – monotonicity – will be to some extent (as always) wrong, but given that it is a risk believed well worth taking – if the average effect in any population is positive (versus negative) the average effect in any other
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