andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-719 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Duncan Watts gave his new book the above title, reflecting his irritation with those annoying people who, upon hearing of the latest social science research, reply with: Duh-I-knew-that. (I don’t know how to say Duh in Australian; maybe someone can translate that for me?) I, like Duncan, am easily irritated, and I looked forward to reading the book. I enjoyed it a lot, even though it has only one graph, and that graph has a problem with its y-axis. (OK, the book also has two diagrams and a graph of fake data, but that doesn’t count.) Before going on, let me say that I agree wholeheartedly with Duncan’s central point: social science research findings are often surprising, but the best results cause us to rethink our world in such a way that they seem completely obvious, in retrospect. (Don Rubin used to tell us that there’s no such thing as a “paradox”: once you fully understand a phenomenon, it should not seem paradoxical any more. When learning science, we sometimes speak
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Duncan Watts gave his new book the above title, reflecting his irritation with those annoying people who, upon hearing of the latest social science research, reply with: Duh-I-knew-that. [sent-1, score-0.318]
2 ) Before going on, let me say that I agree wholeheartedly with Duncan’s central point: social science research findings are often surprising, but the best results cause us to rethink our world in such a way that they seem completely obvious, in retrospect. [sent-6, score-0.258]
3 Everything is Obvious is half a science book and half a business book. [sent-11, score-0.271]
4 The science is all about how information cascades make the world unpredictable, with the recurring theme that our commonsense understanding of the world is often wrong. [sent-12, score-0.183]
5 The business part of the book was ok–I’m not saying it was filler–it’s just that I’m not particularly interested in which format of videocassette wins, or whether Cisco Systems is a well-run company. [sent-15, score-0.214]
6 I also realize that the business insights are relevant for many other aspects of the social world (including but not limited to all sorts of organizations that are not businesses). [sent-17, score-0.308]
7 The albedo-obsessed billionaire Duncan points out that social science is difficult and that physicists and other authority figures often don’t recognize the discoveries made by social scientists. [sent-79, score-0.29]
8 and Microsoft billionaire who likes to invoke albedo (the reflectivity of surfaces) whenever he gets stuck on a physics problem. [sent-83, score-0.287]
9 in physics too, and I certainly wouldn’t trust myself on a physics question. [sent-90, score-0.246]
10 ” So far, no problem: after all, “satisfy their preferences” could always just be the tautology that people do what they want to do (and, as Duncan notes, rational choice models can easily devolve into tautology). [sent-115, score-0.198]
11 It is perfectly possible to apply rational means to other-directed ends (or, for that matter, to be irrational in pursuit of selfish gains, as illustrated by the Human Highlight Film the other day . [sent-132, score-0.214]
12 ) Two kinds of economists’ stories Duncan writes that economists “illustrate the power of rational choice theory in a series of stories about initially puzzling behavior that, upon closer examination, turns out to be perfectly rational. [sent-133, score-0.239]
13 Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist. [sent-137, score-0.214]
14 People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient. [sent-139, score-0.214]
15 consequences for outcomes Duncan describes the story of a person who killed some people while driving a car under the influence of alcohol and points out the difficult in imposing punishment. [sent-154, score-0.205]
16 On the other hand, there would seem to be no political will for generally imposing harsh penalties on dangerous driving in the vast majority of cases where nobody gets hurt. [sent-156, score-0.171]
17 Duncan writes, “it seems grossly disproportionate to treat every otherwise, decent honest person who has ever had a few too many drinks and driven home as a criminal and a killer. [sent-163, score-0.209]
18 The distinction is statistical, but real; Conditional on running a red light and killing several people while driving drunk, I’d say that this person is (a) likely not to be completely decent and honest and (b) likely to be a repeat offender . [sent-175, score-0.35]
19 - Chapter 2 discussed Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein’s finding that people are much more likely to agree to organ donation if agreement is the default option: for example, in Germany only 12% of people agree to be organ donors, while the rate is 99. [sent-211, score-0.266]
20 But figure 1 of this paper by Kieran Healy reports a rate of actual cadaveric donation as 25 per million people in Austria and about 12 per million in Germany. [sent-213, score-0.201]
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