andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-682 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen asks what is the ultimate left-wing novel? He comes up with John Steinbeck and refers us to this list by Josh Leach that includes soclal-realist novels from around 1900. But Cowen is looking for something more “analytically or philosophically comprehensive.” My vote for the ultimate left-wing novel is 1984. The story and the political philosophy fit together well, and it’s also widely read (which is an important part of being the “ultimate” novel of any sort, I think; it wouldn’t do to choose something too obscure). Or maybe Gulliver’s Travels, but I’ve never actually read that, so I don’t know if it qualifies as being left-wing. Certainly you can’t get much more political than 1984, and I don’t think you can get much more left-wing either. (If you get any more left-wing than that, you start to loop around the circle and become right-wing. For example, I don’t think that a novel extolling the brilliance of Stalin or Mao would be considered left-wing in a modern
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1 Tyler Cowen asks what is the ultimate left-wing novel? [sent-1, score-0.342]
2 He comes up with John Steinbeck and refers us to this list by Josh Leach that includes soclal-realist novels from around 1900. [sent-2, score-0.567]
3 But Cowen is looking for something more “analytically or philosophically comprehensive. [sent-3, score-0.254]
4 ” My vote for the ultimate left-wing novel is 1984. [sent-4, score-0.773]
5 The story and the political philosophy fit together well, and it’s also widely read (which is an important part of being the “ultimate” novel of any sort, I think; it wouldn’t do to choose something too obscure). [sent-5, score-0.85]
6 Or maybe Gulliver’s Travels, but I’ve never actually read that, so I don’t know if it qualifies as being left-wing. [sent-6, score-0.208]
7 Certainly you can’t get much more political than 1984, and I don’t think you can get much more left-wing either. [sent-7, score-0.077]
8 (If you get any more left-wing than that, you start to loop around the circle and become right-wing. [sent-8, score-0.294]
9 For example, I don’t think that a novel extolling the brilliance of Stalin or Mao would be considered left-wing in a modern context. [sent-9, score-0.509]
10 ) Native Son (also on Leach’s list) seems like another good choice to me, but I’m sticking with 1984 as being more purely political. [sent-10, score-0.205]
11 For something more recent you could consider something such as What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe. [sent-11, score-0.222]
12 Cowen’s correspondent wrote that “the book needs to do two things: justify the welfare state and argue the limitations of the invisible hand. [sent-14, score-0.7]
13 Unless you want to argue that Bismarck was a left-winger. [sent-16, score-0.126]
14 Good choices: they’re big novels, politically influential, and left-wing. [sent-21, score-0.081]
15 I think the case for 1984 as a left-wing novel is pretty iron-clad. [sent-26, score-0.437]
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen asks what is the ultimate left-wing novel? He comes up with John Steinbeck and refers us to this list by Josh Leach that includes soclal-realist novels from around 1900. But Cowen is looking for something more “analytically or philosophically comprehensive.” My vote for the ultimate left-wing novel is 1984. The story and the political philosophy fit together well, and it’s also widely read (which is an important part of being the “ultimate” novel of any sort, I think; it wouldn’t do to choose something too obscure). Or maybe Gulliver’s Travels, but I’ve never actually read that, so I don’t know if it qualifies as being left-wing. Certainly you can’t get much more political than 1984, and I don’t think you can get much more left-wing either. (If you get any more left-wing than that, you start to loop around the circle and become right-wing. For example, I don’t think that a novel extolling the brilliance of Stalin or Mao would be considered left-wing in a modern
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Introduction: Here’s some psychology research that’s relevant to yesterday’s discussion on working-class voting. In a paper to appear in the journal Cognitive Science , Andrei Cimpian, Amanda Brandone, and Susan Gelman write: Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than
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Introduction: I was stunned this from Jenny Davidson about mystery writers: The crime fiction community is smart and adult and welcoming, and so many good books are being written (Lee Child was mentioning his peer group – i.e. they were the new kids around the same tie – being Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman – the list speaks for itself) . . . Why was I stunned? Because just a few days earlier I had a look at a book by Robert Crais. It just happened that Phil, when he was visiting, had finished this book (which he described as “pretty good”) and left it with me so he wouldn’t have to take it back with him. I’d never heard of Crais, but it had pretty amazing blurbs on the cover and Phil recommended it, so I took a look. It was bad. From page 1 it was bad. It was like a bad cop show. I could see the seams where the sentences were stitched together. I could see how somebody might like this sort of book, but I certainly can’t understand the blurbs or the i
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Introduction: Causality and Statistical Learning Andrew Gelman, Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University Wed 27 Mar, 4pm, Betty Ford Auditorium, Ford School of Public Policy Causal inference is central to the social and biomedical sciences. There are unresolved debates about the meaning of causality and the methods that should be used to measure it. As a statistician, I am trained to say that randomized experiments are a gold standard, yet I have spent almost all my applied career analyzing observational data. In this talk we shall consider various approaches to causal reasoning from the perspective of an applied statistician who recognizes the importance of causal identification yet must learn from available information. Two relevant papers are here and here .
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