andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-755 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: In case you haven’t been following: - Top ten excuses for plagiarism - Why I won’t be sad to see Anthony Weiner retire - U.S. voter participation has not fallen steadily over the past few decades - Scott Adams had an interesting idea
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1 In case you haven’t been following: - Top ten excuses for plagiarism - Why I won’t be sad to see Anthony Weiner retire - U. [sent-1, score-1.368]
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same-blog 1 1.0 755 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-09-Recently in the award-winning sister blog
Introduction: In case you haven’t been following: - Top ten excuses for plagiarism - Why I won’t be sad to see Anthony Weiner retire - U.S. voter participation has not fallen steadily over the past few decades - Scott Adams had an interesting idea
Introduction: We were having so much fun on this thread that I couldn’t resist linking to this news item by Adrian Chen. The good news is that Scott Adams (creater of the Dilbert comic strip) “has a certified genius IQ” and that he “can open jars with [his] bare hands.” He is also “able to lift heavy objects.” Cool! In all seriousness, I knew nothing about this aspect of Adams when I wrote the earlier blog. I was just surprised (and remain surprised) that he was so impressed with Charlie Sheen for being good-looking and being able to remember his lines. At the time I thought it was just a matter of Adams being overly-influenced by his direct experience, along with some satisfaction in separating himself from the general mass of Sheen-haters out there. But now I wonder if something more is going on, that maybe he feels that he and Sheen are on the same side in a culture war. In any case, the ultimate topic of interest here is not Sheen or Adams but rather more general questions of what
Introduction: Scott “Dilbert” Adams has met Charlie Sheen and thinks he really is a superbeing. This perhaps relates to some well-known cognitive biases. I’m not sure what this one’s called, but the idea is that Adams is probably overweighting his direct impressions: he saw Sheen-on-the-set, not Sheen-beating-his-wife. Also, everybody else hates Sheen, so Adams can distinguish himself by being tolerant, etc. I’m not sure what this latter phenomenon is called, but I’ve noticed it before. When I come into a new situation and meet some person X, who everybody says is a jerk, and then person X happens to act in a civilized way that day, then there’s a real temptation to say, Hey, X isn’t so bad after all. It makes me feel so tolerant and above-it-all. Perhaps that’s partly what’s going on with Scott Adams here: he can view himself as the objective outsider who can be impressed by Sheen, not like all those silly emotional people who get hung up on the headlines. From here, though, it just ma
4 0.12075585 1867 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-22-To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime
Introduction: I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way about plagiarism that a rich person would feel about counterfeiting: Don’t debase my currency! But it’s more than that. After discussing this a bit with Thomas Basbøll, I realized that I’m bothered by the way that plagiarism interferes with the transmission of information: Much has been written on the ethics of plagiarism. One aspect that has received less notice is plagiarism’s role in corrupting our ability to learn from data: We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work. In statisti
Introduction: Hey, we all know the answer: “correlation does not imply causation”—but of course life is more complicated than that. As philosophers, economists, statisticians, and others have repeatedly noted, most of our information about the world is observational not experimental, yet we manage to draw causal conclusions all the time. Sure, some of these conclusions are wrong (more often than 5% of the time, I’m sure) but that’s an accepted part of life. Challenges in this regard arise in the design of a study, in the statistical analysis, in how you write it up for a peer-reviewed journal, and finally in how you present it to the world. School sports and life outcomes An interesting case of all this came up recently in a post on Freakonomics that pointed to a post on Deadspin that pointed to a research article . The claim was that “sports participation [in high school] causes women to be less likely to be religious . . . more likely to have children . . . more likely to be singl
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Introduction: In case you haven’t been following: - Top ten excuses for plagiarism - Why I won’t be sad to see Anthony Weiner retire - U.S. voter participation has not fallen steadily over the past few decades - Scott Adams had an interesting idea
2 0.73870033 722 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-20-Why no Wegmania?
Introduction: A colleague asks: When I search the web, I find the story [of the article by Said, Wegman, et al. on social networks in climate research, which was recently bumped from the journal Computational Statistics and Data Analysis because of plagiarism] only on blogs, USA Today, and UPI. Why is that? Any idea why it isn’t reported by any of the major newspapers? Here’s my answer: 1. USA Today broke the story. Apparently this USA Today reporter put a lot of effort into it. The NYT doesn’t like to run a story that begins, “Yesterday, USA Today reported…” 2. To us it’s big news because we’re statisticians. [The main guy in the study, Edward Wegman, won the Founders Award from the American Statistical Association a few years ago.] To the rest of the world, the story is: “Obscure prof at an obscure college plagiarized an article in a journal that nobody’s ever heard of.” When a Harvard scientist paints black dots on white mice and says he’s curing cancer, that’s news. When P
3 0.69253761 766 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-Last Wegman post (for now)
Introduction: John Mashey points me to a news article by Eli Kintisch with the following wonderful quote: Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton University who questions the consensus view on climate, thinks Mashey is a destructive force who uses “totalitarian tactics”–publishing damaging documents online, without peer review–to carry out personal vendettas. I’ve never thought of uploading files as “totalitarian” but maybe they do things differently at Princeton. I actually think of totalitarians as acting secretly–denunciations without evidence, midnight arrests, trials in undisclosed locations, and so forth. Mashey’s practice of putting everything out in the open seems to me the opposite of totalitarian. The article also reports that Edward Wegman’s lawyer said that Wegman “has never engaged in plagiarism.” If I were the lawyer, I’d be pretty mad at Wegman at this point. I can just imagine the conversation: Lawyer: You never told me about that 2005 paper where you stole from Bria
4 0.68391842 1568 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-That last satisfaction at the end of the career
Introduction: I just finished reading an amusing but somewhat disturbing article by Mark Singer, a reporter for the New Yorker who follows in that magazine’s tradition of writing about amiable frauds. (For those who are keeping score at home, Singer employs a McKelway-style relaxed tolerance rather than Liebling-style pyrotechnics.) Singer’s topic was a midwestern dentist named Kip Litton who fradulently invented a side career for himself as a sub-3-hour marathoner. What was amazing was not so much that Litton lied about his accomplishments but, rather, the huge efforts that he undertook to support these lies. He went to faraway cities to not run marathons. He fabricated multiple personas on running message boards. He even invented an entire marathon and made up a list of participants. This got me thinking about Ed Wegman (sorry!), the statistician who got tangled in a series of plagiarism scandals . As with Litton, once Wegman was caught once, energetic people looked at the records and
5 0.67712271 728 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-24-A (not quite) grand unified theory of plagiarism, as applied to the Wegman case
Introduction: A common reason for plagiarism is laziness: you want credit for doing something but you don’t really feel like doing it–maybe you’d rather go fishing, or bowling, or blogging, or whatever, so you just steal it, or you hire someone to steal it for you. Interestingly enough, we see that in many defenses of plagiarism allegations. A common response is: I was sloppy in dealing with my notes, or I let my research assistant (who, incidentally, wasn’t credited in the final version) copy things for me and the research assistant got sloppy. The common theme: The person wanted the credit without doing the work. As I wrote last year, I like to think that directness and openness is a virtue in scientific writing. For example, clearly citing the works we draw from, even when such citing of secondary sources might make us appear less erudite. But I can see how some scholars might feel a pressure to cover their traces. Wegman Which brings us to Ed Wegman, whose defense of plagiari
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Introduction: In case you haven’t been following: - Top ten excuses for plagiarism - Why I won’t be sad to see Anthony Weiner retire - U.S. voter participation has not fallen steadily over the past few decades - Scott Adams had an interesting idea
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Introduction: Recently in the sister blog . Yet another chapter in the continuing saga, Don’t Trust Polynomials. P.S. More here .
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Introduction: A moviegoing colleague writes: I just watched the movie Zero Dark Thirty about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. What struck me about it was: (1) Bayes theorem underlies the whole movie; (2) CIA top brass do not know Bayes theorem (at least as portrayed in the movie). Obviously one does not need to know physics to play billiards, but it helps with the reasoning. Essentially, at some point the key CIA agent locates what she strongly believes is OBL’s hidding place in Pakistan. Then it takes the White House some 150 days to make the decision to attack the compound. Why so long? And why, even on the eve of the operation, were senior brass only some 60% OBL was there? Fear of false positives is the answer. After all, the compound could belong to a drug lord, or some other terrorist. Here is the math: There are two possibilities, according to movie: OBL is in a compound (C) in a city or he is in the mountains in tribal regions. Say P(OBL in C) = 0.5. A diagnosis is made on
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Introduction: Hey, this looks cool: Towards a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers Virgil Gligor Carnegie Mellon University We argue that a general theory of trust in networks of humans and computers must be build on both a theory of behavioral trust and a theory of computational trust. This argument is motivated by increased participation of people in social networking, crowdsourcing, human computation, and socio-economic protocols, e.g., protocols modeled by trust and gift-exchange games, norms-establishing contracts, and scams/deception. User participation in these protocols relies primarily on trust, since on-line verification of protocol compliance is often impractical; e.g., verification can lead to undecidable problems, co-NP complete test procedures, and user inconvenience. Trust is captured by participant preferences (i.e., risk and betrayal aversion) and beliefs in the trustworthiness of other protocol participants. Both preferences and beliefs can be enhanced
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