andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-688 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: I was invited by the Columbia University residence halls to speak at an event on gay marriage. (I’ve assisted my colleagues Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips in their research on the topic.) The event sounded fun–unfortunately I’ll be out of town that weekend so can’t make it–but it got me thinking about how gay marriage and other social issues are so relaxing to think about because there’s no need for doubt. About half of Americans support same-sex marriage and about half oppose it. And the funny thing is, you can be absolutely certain in your conviction, from either direction. If you support, it’s a simple matter of human rights, and it’s a bit ridiculous to suppose that if gay marriage is allowed, it will somehow wreck all the straight marriages out there. Conversely, you can oppose on the clear rationale of wanting to keep marriage the same as it’s always been, and suggest that same-sex couples can be free to get together outside of marriage, as they always could. (Hey, it was g
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1 I was invited by the Columbia University residence halls to speak at an event on gay marriage. [sent-1, score-0.561]
2 (I’ve assisted my colleagues Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips in their research on the topic. [sent-2, score-0.125]
3 ) The event sounded fun–unfortunately I’ll be out of town that weekend so can’t make it–but it got me thinking about how gay marriage and other social issues are so relaxing to think about because there’s no need for doubt. [sent-3, score-1.136]
4 About half of Americans support same-sex marriage and about half oppose it. [sent-4, score-0.879]
5 And the funny thing is, you can be absolutely certain in your conviction, from either direction. [sent-5, score-0.084]
6 If you support, it’s a simple matter of human rights, and it’s a bit ridiculous to suppose that if gay marriage is allowed, it will somehow wreck all the straight marriages out there. [sent-6, score-0.848]
7 Conversely, you can oppose on the clear rationale of wanting to keep marriage the same as it’s always been, and suggest that same-sex couples can be free to get together outside of marriage, as they always could. [sent-7, score-0.755]
8 ) In contrast, the difficulty of expressing opinions about the economy, or about foreign policy, is that you have to realize at some level that you might be wrong. [sent-9, score-0.163]
9 For example, even Paul Krugman must occasionally wonder whether maybe the U. [sent-10, score-0.632]
10 can’t really afford another trillion dollars of debt, and even William Beach (he of the 2. [sent-12, score-0.204]
11 8% unemployment rate forecast , later updated to a still-implausible point forecast of 4. [sent-13, score-0.378]
12 3%) must occasionally wonder whether massive budget cuts will really send the economy into nirvana. [sent-14, score-0.932]
13 Similarly, even John McCain must wonder on occasion whether it would’ve been better to withdraw from Iraq in 2003, or 2004, or 2005. [sent-15, score-0.615]
14 And even a firm opponent of the war such as the Barack Obama of early 2008 must have occasionally thought that maybe the invasion wasn’t such a bad idea on balance. [sent-16, score-0.59]
15 I just think it’s interesting how there can be so much more feeling of certainty about social policy. [sent-18, score-0.085]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 688 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-30-Why it’s so relaxing to think about social issues
Introduction: I was invited by the Columbia University residence halls to speak at an event on gay marriage. (I’ve assisted my colleagues Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips in their research on the topic.) The event sounded fun–unfortunately I’ll be out of town that weekend so can’t make it–but it got me thinking about how gay marriage and other social issues are so relaxing to think about because there’s no need for doubt. About half of Americans support same-sex marriage and about half oppose it. And the funny thing is, you can be absolutely certain in your conviction, from either direction. If you support, it’s a simple matter of human rights, and it’s a bit ridiculous to suppose that if gay marriage is allowed, it will somehow wreck all the straight marriages out there. Conversely, you can oppose on the clear rationale of wanting to keep marriage the same as it’s always been, and suggest that same-sex couples can be free to get together outside of marriage, as they always could. (Hey, it was g
2 0.20434433 224 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-22-Mister P gets married
Introduction: Jeff, Justin, and I write : Gay marriage is not going away as a highly emotional, contested issue. Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that bans same-sex marriage, has seen to that, as it winds its way through the federal courts. But perhaps the public has reached a turning point. And check out the (mildly) dynamic graphics. The picture below is ok but for the full effect you have to click through and play the movie.
3 0.16757452 707 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-12-Human nature can’t be changed (except when it can)
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
Introduction: The above graph shows the estimated support, by state, for the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, a gay rights bill that the Senate will be voting on this Monday. The estimates were constructed by Kate Krimmel, Jeff Lax, and Justin Phillips using multilevel regression and poststratification. Check out that graph again. The scale goes from 20% to 80%, but every state is in the yellow-to-red range. Support for a law making it illegal to discriminate against gays has majority support in every state. And in most states the support is very strong. And here’s the research paper by Krimmel, Lax, and Phillips, which begins: Public majorities have supported several gay rights policies for some time, yet Congress has responded slowly if at all. We address this puzzle through dyadic analysis of the opinion- vote relationship on 23 roll-call votes between 1993 and 2010, matching members of Congress to policy-specific opinion in their state or district. We also extend the MRP opinion e
5 0.11957411 594 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-28-Behavioral economics doesn’t seem to have much to say about marriage
Introduction: This was just bizarre. It’s an interview with Colin Camerer, a professor of finance and economics at Caltech, The topic is Camerer’s marriage, but what’s weird is that he doesn’t say anything specific about his wife at all. All we get are witticisms of the sub-Henny-Youngman level, for example, in response to the question, “Any free riding in your household?”, Camerer says: No. Here’s why: I am one of the world’s leading experts on psychology, the brain and strategic game theory. But my wife is a woman. So it’s a tie. Also some schoolyard evolutionary biology (“men signaling that they will help you raise your baby after conception, and women signaling fidelity” blah blah blah) and advice for husbands in “upper-class marriages with assets.” (No advice to the wives, but maybe that’s a good thing.) And here are his insights on love and marriage: Marriage is like hot slow-burning embers compared to the flashy flames of love. After the babies, the married brain has better thin
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same-blog 1 0.94676685 688 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-30-Why it’s so relaxing to think about social issues
Introduction: I was invited by the Columbia University residence halls to speak at an event on gay marriage. (I’ve assisted my colleagues Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips in their research on the topic.) The event sounded fun–unfortunately I’ll be out of town that weekend so can’t make it–but it got me thinking about how gay marriage and other social issues are so relaxing to think about because there’s no need for doubt. About half of Americans support same-sex marriage and about half oppose it. And the funny thing is, you can be absolutely certain in your conviction, from either direction. If you support, it’s a simple matter of human rights, and it’s a bit ridiculous to suppose that if gay marriage is allowed, it will somehow wreck all the straight marriages out there. Conversely, you can oppose on the clear rationale of wanting to keep marriage the same as it’s always been, and suggest that same-sex couples can be free to get together outside of marriage, as they always could. (Hey, it was g
2 0.77944762 707 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-12-Human nature can’t be changed (except when it can)
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
3 0.77578896 1936 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-13-Economic policy does not occur in a political vacuum
Introduction: Even if a policymaker is sure of the ideal economic policy, he or she can only implement it with the help of some of the other political players. But I’m saying something different, echoing what I wrote a couple days ago. I thought of this the other day after seeing this recent quote from Paul Krugman ( extracted by Brad DeLong) about Larry “Starbucks” Summers: Summers is . . . indistinguishable from me [Krugman] on macro-policy. And he may be a bit to the left, because he’s even more certain than I am . . . that some extra spending now will actually help us more in fiscal terms. So he published a piece in the Financial Times that was meant to be a big statement about this. But before he got to that, he spend three paragraphs about the importance of dealing with the deficit in the medium term . . . to establish that ‘I am a respectable person; I am not like that rabble-rouser, Krugman.’ . . . Maybe. But, going back to 2009, I still suspect that Summers, or some part of S
4 0.7411164 814 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-21-The powerful consumer?
Introduction: Economist David Backus writes : A casual reader of economic news can’t help but get the impression that the way to get the economy moving is to have people spend more — consume more, in the language of macroeconomics. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? At the risk of making the obvious complicated, I’d say it’s not so obvious. It’s also not obvious that consumption has gone down since the crisis, or that saving has gone up. So what’s going on with the labor market? I’ll get to the rest of the explanation, but first some background. The other day, I posted posted this remark from Backus: This is from my area of work, macroeconomics. The suggestion here is that the economy is growing slowly because consumers aren’t spending money. But how do we know it’s not the reverse: that consumers are spending less because the economy isn’t doing well. As a teacher, I can tell you that it’s almost impossible to get students to understand that the first statement isn’t obviously true
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Introduction: Daniel Mendelsohn recently asked , “Why do we love the Titanic?”, seeking to understand how it has happened that: It may not be true that ‘the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,’ as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. . . . The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. . . . If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, yo
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1 0.96741301 1463 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-19-It is difficult to convey intonation in typed speech
Introduction: I just wanted to add the above comment to Bob’s notes on language. Spoken (and, to some extent, handwritten) language can be much more expressive than the typed version. I’m not just talking about slang or words such as baaaaad; I’m also talking about pauses that give logical structure to a sentence. For example, sentences such as “The girl who hit the ball where the dog used to be was the one who was climbing the tree when the dog came by” are effortless to understand in speech but can be difficult for a reader to follow. Often when I write, I need to untangle my sentences to keep them readable.
2 0.96375191 1617 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-11-Math Talks :: Action Movies
Introduction: Jonathan Goodman gave the departmental seminar yesterday (10 Dec 2012) and I was amused by an extended analogy he made. After his (very clear) intro, he said that math talks were like action movies. The overall theorem and its applications provide the plot, and the proofs provide the action scenes.
3 0.92794192 1896 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-13-Against the myth of the heroic visualization
Introduction: Alberto Cairo tells a fascinating story about John Snow, H. W. Acland, and the Mythmaking Problem: Every human community—nations, ethnic and cultural groups, professional guilds—inevitably raises a few of its members to the status of heroes and weaves myths around them. . . . The visual display of information is no stranger to heroes and myth. In fact, being a set of disciplines with a relatively small amount of practitioners and researchers, it has generated a staggering number of heroes, perhaps as a morale-enhancing mechanism. Most of us have heard of the wonders of William Playfair’s Commercial and Political Atlas, Florence Nightingale’s coxcomb charts, Charles Joseph Minard’s Napoleon’s march diagram, and Henry Beck’s 1933 redesign of the London Underground map. . . . Cairo’s goal, I think, is not to disparage these great pioneers of graphics but rather to put their work in perspective, recognizing the work of their excellent contemporaries. I would like to echo Cairo’
same-blog 4 0.92458248 688 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-30-Why it’s so relaxing to think about social issues
Introduction: I was invited by the Columbia University residence halls to speak at an event on gay marriage. (I’ve assisted my colleagues Jeff Lax and Justin Phillips in their research on the topic.) The event sounded fun–unfortunately I’ll be out of town that weekend so can’t make it–but it got me thinking about how gay marriage and other social issues are so relaxing to think about because there’s no need for doubt. About half of Americans support same-sex marriage and about half oppose it. And the funny thing is, you can be absolutely certain in your conviction, from either direction. If you support, it’s a simple matter of human rights, and it’s a bit ridiculous to suppose that if gay marriage is allowed, it will somehow wreck all the straight marriages out there. Conversely, you can oppose on the clear rationale of wanting to keep marriage the same as it’s always been, and suggest that same-sex couples can be free to get together outside of marriage, as they always could. (Hey, it was g
5 0.91020882 1299 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-04-Models, assumptions, and data summaries
Introduction: I saw an analysis recently that I didn’t like. I won’t go into the details, but basically it was a dose-response inference, where a continuous exposure was binned into three broad categories (terciles of the data) and the probability of an adverse event was computed for each tercile. The effect and the sample size was large enough that the terciles were statistically-significantly different from each other in probability of adverse event, with the probabilities increasing from low to mid to high exposure, as one would predict. I didn’t like this analysis because it is equivalent to fitting a step function. There is a tendency for people to interpret the (arbitrary) tercile boundaries as being meaningful thresholds even though the underlying dose-response relation has to be continuous. I’d prefer to start with a linear model and then add nonlinearity from there with a spline or whatever. At this point I stepped back and thought: Hey, the divide-into-three analysis does not lite
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