andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-691 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Chris Masse writes: I know you hate the topic, but during this debate (discussing both sides), they were issues raised that are of interest of your science. Actually I just don’t have the patience to watch videos. But I’ll forward it on to the rest of you. I’ve already posted my thoughts on the matter here . ESP is certainly something that a lot of people want to be true.
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2 Actually I just don’t have the patience to watch videos. [sent-2, score-0.572]
3 I’ve already posted my thoughts on the matter here . [sent-4, score-0.612]
4 ESP is certainly something that a lot of people want to be true. [sent-5, score-0.458]
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same-blog 1 1.0 691 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-03-Psychology researchers discuss ESP
Introduction: Chris Masse writes: I know you hate the topic, but during this debate (discussing both sides), they were issues raised that are of interest of your science. Actually I just don’t have the patience to watch videos. But I’ll forward it on to the rest of you. I’ve already posted my thoughts on the matter here . ESP is certainly something that a lot of people want to be true.
2 0.17088759 506 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-06-That silly ESP paper and some silliness in a rebuttal as well
Introduction: John Talbott points me to this , which I briefly mocked a couple months ago. I largely agree with the critics of this research, but I want to reiterate my point from earlier that all the statistical sophistication in the world won’t help you if you’re studying a null effect. This is not to say that the actual effect is zero—who am I to say?—just that the comments about the high-quality statistics in the article don’t say much to me. There’s lots of discussion of the lack of science underlying ESP claims. I can’t offer anything useful on that account (not being a psychologist, I could imagine all sorts of stories about brain waves or whatever), but I would like to point out something that usually doesn’t seem to get mentioned in these discussions, which is that lots of people want to believe in ESP. After all, it would be cool to read minds. (It wouldn’t be so cool, maybe, if other people could read your mind and you couldn’t read theirs, but I suspect most people don’t think
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Introduction: Chris Masse points me to this response by Daryl Bem and two statisticians (Jessica Utts and Wesley Johnson) to criticisms by Wagenmakers et.al. of Bem’s recent ESP study. I have nothing to add but would like to repeat a couple bits of my discussions of last month, of here : Classical statistical methods that work reasonably well when studying moderate or large effects (see the work of Fisher, Snedecor, Cochran, etc.) fall apart in the presence of small effects. I think it’s naive when people implicitly assume that the study’s claims are correct, or the study’s statistical methods are weak. Generally, the smaller the effects you’re studying, the better the statistics you need. ESP is a field of small effects and so ESP researchers use high-quality statistics. To put it another way: whatever methodological errors happen to be in the paper in question, probably occur in lots of researcher papers in “legitimate” psychology research. The difference is that when you’re studying a
5 0.11883003 991 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-04-Insecure researchers aren’t sharing their data
Introduction: Jelte Wicherts writes: I thought you might be interested in reading this paper that is to appear this week in PLoS ONE. In it we [Wicherts, Marjan Bakker, and Dylan Molenaar] show that the willingness to share data from published psychological research is associated both with “the strength of the evidence” (against H0) and the prevalence of errors in the reporting of p-values. The issue of data archiving will likely be put on the agenda of granting bodies and the APA/APS because of what Diederik Stapel did . I hate hate hate hate hate when people don’t share their data. In fact, that’s the subject of my very first column on ethics for Chance magazine. I have a story from 22 years ago, when I contacted some scientists and showed them how I could reanalyze their data more efficiently (based on a preliminary analysis of their published summary statistics). They seemed to feel threatened by the suggestion and refused to send me their raw data. (It was an animal experiment
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same-blog 1 0.94716167 691 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-03-Psychology researchers discuss ESP
Introduction: Chris Masse writes: I know you hate the topic, but during this debate (discussing both sides), they were issues raised that are of interest of your science. Actually I just don’t have the patience to watch videos. But I’ll forward it on to the rest of you. I’ve already posted my thoughts on the matter here . ESP is certainly something that a lot of people want to be true.
2 0.73332644 889 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-04-The acupuncture paradox
Introduction: The scientific consensus appears to be that, to the extent that acupuncture makes people feel better, it is through relaxing the patient, also the acupuncturist might help in other ways, encouraging the patient to focus on his or her lifestyle. A friend recommended an acupuncturist to me awhile ago and I told her the above line, to which she replied: No, I don’t feel at all relaxed when I go to the acupuncturist. Those needles really hurt! I don’t know anything about this, but one thing I do know is that whenever I discuss the topic with a Chinese friend, they assure me that acupuncture is real. Real real. Not “yeah, it works by calming people” real or “patients respond to a doctor who actually cares about them” real. Real real. The needles, the special places to put the needles, the whole thing. I haven’t had a long discussion on this, but my impression is that Chinese people think of acupuncture as working in the same way that we think of TV’s or cars or refrigerators:
3 0.73121864 1158 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-07-The more likely it is to be X, the more likely it is to be Not X?
Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. A paper by Wood, Douglas, and Sutton looks at “Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories.” Unfortunately the subjects were 140 undergraduate psychology students, so one wonders how general the results are. I found this sort of arresting: In Study 1 (n=137), the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed she was murdered. In Study 2 (n=102), the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. Special Forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive. As the article says, “conspiracy advocates’ distrust of official narratives may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any contradictions between them.” But I think the authors overstate things when they say “One would think that there ought to be a negative correlation between beliefs in contradictory accounts of events — the more one believes in
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Introduction: After blogging on quirky software pioneer Richard Stallman , I thought it appropriate to write something about recently deceased quirky software pioneer John McCarthy, who, with the exception of being bearded, seems like he was the personal and political opposite of Stallman. Here’s a page I found of Stallman McCarthy quotes (compiled by Neil Craig). It’s a mixture of the reasonable and the unreasonable (ok, I suppose the same could be said of this blog!). I wonder if he and Stallman ever met and, if so, whether they had an extended conversation. It would be like matter and anti-matter! P.S. I flipped through McCarthy’s pages and found one of my pet peeves. See item 3 here , which sounds so plausible but is in fact not true (at least, not according to the National Election Study). As McCarthy’s Stanford colleague Mo Fiorina can tell you, otherwise well-informed people believe all sorts of things about polarization that aren’t so. Labeling groups of Americans as “
5 0.71793574 506 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-06-That silly ESP paper and some silliness in a rebuttal as well
Introduction: John Talbott points me to this , which I briefly mocked a couple months ago. I largely agree with the critics of this research, but I want to reiterate my point from earlier that all the statistical sophistication in the world won’t help you if you’re studying a null effect. This is not to say that the actual effect is zero—who am I to say?—just that the comments about the high-quality statistics in the article don’t say much to me. There’s lots of discussion of the lack of science underlying ESP claims. I can’t offer anything useful on that account (not being a psychologist, I could imagine all sorts of stories about brain waves or whatever), but I would like to point out something that usually doesn’t seem to get mentioned in these discussions, which is that lots of people want to believe in ESP. After all, it would be cool to read minds. (It wouldn’t be so cool, maybe, if other people could read your mind and you couldn’t read theirs, but I suspect most people don’t think
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same-blog 1 0.94385302 691 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-03-Psychology researchers discuss ESP
Introduction: Chris Masse writes: I know you hate the topic, but during this debate (discussing both sides), they were issues raised that are of interest of your science. Actually I just don’t have the patience to watch videos. But I’ll forward it on to the rest of you. I’ve already posted my thoughts on the matter here . ESP is certainly something that a lot of people want to be true.
2 0.93112636 765 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-How the ignorant idiots win, explained. Maybe.
Introduction: According to a New York Times article , cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have a new theory about rational argument: humans didn’t develop it in order to learn about the world, we developed it in order to win arguments with other people. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Based on the NYT article, it seems that Mercier and Sperber are basically flipping around the traditional argument, which is that humans learned to reason about the world, albeit imperfectly, and learned to use language to convey that reasoning to others. These guys would suggest that it’s the other way around: we learned to argue with others, and this has gradually led to the ability to actually make (and recognize) sound arguments, but only indirectly. The article says “”At least in some cultural contexts, this results in a kind of arms race towards greater sophistication in the production and evaluation o
3 0.92929268 2093 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-07-I’m negative on the expression “false positives”
Introduction: After seeing a document sent to me and others regarding the crisis of spurious, statistically-significant research findings in psychology research, I had the following reaction: I am unhappy with the use in the document of the phrase “false positives.” I feel that this expression is unhelpful as it frames science in terms of “true” and “false” claims, which I don’t think is particularly accurate. In particular, in most of the recent disputed Psych Science type studies (the ESP study excepted, perhaps), there is little doubt that there is _some_ underlying effect. The issue, as I see it, as that the underlying effects are much smaller, and much more variable, than mainstream researchers imagine. So what happens is that Psych Science or Nature or whatever will publish a result that is purported to be some sort of universal truth, but it is actually a pattern specific to one data set, one population, and one experimental condition. In a sense, yes, these journals are publishing
4 0.92405534 1983 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-15-More on AIC, WAIC, etc
Introduction: Following up on our discussion from the other day, Angelika van der Linde sends along this paper from 2012 (link to journal here ). And Aki pulls out this great quote from Geisser and Eddy (1979): This discussion makes clear that in the nested case this method, as Akaike’s, is not consistent; i.e., even if $M_k$ is true, it will be rejected with probability $\alpha$ as $N\to\infty$. This point is also made by Schwarz (1978). However, from the point of view of prediction, this is of no great consequence. For large numbers of observations, a prediction based on the falsely assumed $M_k$, will not differ appreciably from one based on the true $M_k$. For example, if we assert that two normal populations have different means when in fact they have the same mean, then the use of the group mean as opposed to the grand mean for predicting a future observation results in predictors which are asymptotically equivalent and whose predictive variances are $\sigma^2[1 + (1/2n)]$ and $\si
5 0.91869813 759 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-11-“2 level logit with 2 REs & large sample. computational nightmare – please help”
Introduction: I received an email with the above title from Daniel Adkins, who elaborates: I [Adkins] am having a tough time with a dataset including 40K obs and 8K subjects. Trying to estimate a 2 level logit with random intercept and age slope and about 13 fixed covariates. I have tried several R packages (lme4, lme4a, glmmPQL, MCMCglmm) and stata xtmelogit and gllamm to no avail. xtmelogit crashes from insufficient memory. The R packages yield false convergences. A simpler model w/ random intercept only gives stable estimates in lme4 with a very large number of quadrature point (nAGQ>220). When i try this (nAGQ=221) with the random age term, it doesn’t make it through a single iteration in 72 hours (have tried both w/ and w/out RE correlation). I am using a power desktop that is top of the line compared to anything other than a cluster. Have tried start values for fixed effects in lme4 and that doesn’t help (couldn’t figure out how to specify RE starts). Do you have any advice. Should I move t
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