andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-675 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I received the following email from someone who’d like to remain anonymous: Lately I [the anonymous correspondent] witnessed that Bruno Frey has published two articles in two well known referreed journals on the Titanic disaster that try to explain survival rates of passenger on board. The articles were published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives and Rationality & Society . While looking up the name of the second journal where I stumbled across the article I even saw that they put the message in a third journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of America . To say it in Sopranos like style – with all due respect, I know Bruno Frey from conferences, I really appreciate his take on economics as a social science and he has really published more interesting stuff that most economists ever will. But putting the same message into three journals gives me headaches for at least two reasons: 1) When building a track record and scientific rep
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 I received the following email from someone who’d like to remain anonymous: Lately I [the anonymous correspondent] witnessed that Bruno Frey has published two articles in two well known referreed journals on the Titanic disaster that try to explain survival rates of passenger on board. [sent-1, score-0.581]
2 The articles were published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives and Rationality & Society . [sent-2, score-0.223]
3 To say it in Sopranos like style – with all due respect, I know Bruno Frey from conferences, I really appreciate his take on economics as a social science and he has really published more interesting stuff that most economists ever will. [sent-4, score-0.264]
4 But putting the same message into three journals gives me headaches for at least two reasons: 1) When building a track record and scientific reputation, it’s publish or perish. [sent-5, score-0.334]
5 What about young scholars that may have interesting stuff to say, but get rejected for (sometimes) obscure reasons, especially if you have innovative ideas that run against the mainstream. [sent-6, score-0.206]
6 2) As an author one usually gets the question on “are the results published in another journal” (and therefore not original) or “is this paper under review in an another journal”. [sent-10, score-0.249]
7 The three papers do indeed seem to describe similar work. [sent-18, score-0.215]
8 This abstract has the form of a movie trailer: lots of explosions, lots of drama, but no revealing of the plot. [sent-22, score-0.208]
9 Finally, here’s the PNAS abstract, which tells us what they found: To understand human behavior, it is important to know under what conditions people deviate from selfish rationality. [sent-23, score-0.25]
10 This study explores the interaction of natural survival instincts and internalized social norms using data on the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania. [sent-24, score-0.31]
11 We show that time pressure appears to be crucial when explaining behavior under extreme conditions of life and death. [sent-25, score-0.202]
12 Even though the two vessels and the composition of their passengers were quite similar, the behavior of the individuals on board was dramatically different. [sent-26, score-0.281]
13 On the Lusitania, selfish behavior dominated (which corresponds to the classical homo economicus); on the Titanic, social norms and social status (class) dominated, which contradicts standard economics. [sent-27, score-0.546]
14 Knowing human behavior under extreme conditions provides insight into how widely human behavior can vary, depending on differing external conditions. [sent-31, score-0.45]
15 As Aaron Edlin, Noah Kaplan, and I have stressed, rationality doesn’t have to imply selfishness, and selfishness doesn’t have to imply rationality. [sent-34, score-0.331]
16 Regarding the other question, of how could the same paper be published three times, my guess is that a paper on the Titanic can partly get published for its novelty value: even serious journals like to sometimes run articles on offbeat topics. [sent-39, score-0.746]
17 Tex replied: the theorem is that any result can only be published at most five times. [sent-52, score-0.371]
18 Tex replied; The weak form of Arrow’s Theorem is that any result can be published no more than five times. [sent-56, score-0.313]
19 The strong form is that every result will be published five times. [sent-57, score-0.37]
20 ) colleagues asking me why, since votes are discrete, I wasn’t using a discrete-data model such as a Poisson (and, no, he wasn’t persuaded by my argument that if you have 100,000 votes in a congressional district, it’s ok to model it as continuous) . [sent-67, score-0.197]
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