andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-767 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: When you say that somebody else screwed up, you have to be extra careful you’re not getting things wrong yourself! A philosopher of science is quoted as having written, “it seems best to let this grubby affair rest in a footnote,” but I think it’s good for these things to be out in the open.
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same-blog 1 1.0 767 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-15-Error in an attribution of an error
Introduction: When you say that somebody else screwed up, you have to be extra careful you’re not getting things wrong yourself! A philosopher of science is quoted as having written, “it seems best to let this grubby affair rest in a footnote,” but I think it’s good for these things to be out in the open.
2 0.25158426 1026 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-25-Bayes wikipedia update
Introduction: I checked and somebody went in and screwed up my fixes to the wikipedia page on Bayesian inference. I give up.
3 0.12560305 761 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-13-A survey’s not a survey if they don’t tell you how they did it
Introduction: Since we’re on the topic of nonreplicable research . . . see here (link from here ) for a story of a survey that’s so bad that the people who did it won’t say how they did it. I know too many cases where people screwed up in a survey when they were actually trying to get the right answer, for me to trust any report of a survey that doesn’t say what they did. I’m reminded of this survey which may well have been based on a sample of size 6 (again, the people who did it refused to release any description of methodology).
4 0.1097398 1433 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-28-LOL without the CATS
Introduction: Mayo points me to this discussion [link fixed] on parsimony by philosopher Elliott Sober. I don’t really understand what he’s talking about but I am posting the link here because it might interest some of you. P.S. More discussion on this from Mayo here .
5 0.10858748 890 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-05-Error statistics
Introduction: New blog from the philosopher Deborah Mayo who I think agrees with me about many statistical issues although from a non-Bayesian perspective. But I disagree with her when she writes that certain criticisms of frequentist statistical methods “keep popping up (verbatim) in every Bayesian textbook and article on philosophical foundations.” I’ve written a couple of Bayesian textbooks and some articles on philosophical foundations, and I don’t think I do this! That said, I think Mayo has a lot to say, so I wouldn’t judge her whole blog (let alone her published work) based on that one intemperate statement.
6 0.08426176 854 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-15-A silly paper that tries to make fun of multilevel models
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11 0.064245448 932 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-30-Articles on the philosophy of Bayesian statistics by Cox, Mayo, Senn, and others!
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Introduction: When you say that somebody else screwed up, you have to be extra careful you’re not getting things wrong yourself! A philosopher of science is quoted as having written, “it seems best to let this grubby affair rest in a footnote,” but I think it’s good for these things to be out in the open.
2 0.7796753 1003 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-11-$
Introduction: Felix Salmon relates the story of an economics Nobel Prize winner getting paid by a hedge fund. It would all seems pretty silly—sort of like Coca-Cola featuring Michael Jordan in their ads—except that hedge funds are disreputable nowadays and so it seems vaguely sleazy for a scholar to trade on his academic reputation to make free money in this way. It falls roughly in the same category as that notorious b-school prof in Inside Job who got $125K for writing a b.s. report about the financial stability of Iceland—and then, when they came back to him later and asked how he could’ve written it, he basically said: Hey, I don’t know anything about Iceland, I was just taking their money! That said, if a hedge fund offered me $125K to sit on their board, I’d probably take it! It’s hard to turn down free money. Or maybe not, I don’t really know. So far, when companies have paid me $, it’s been to do something for them, to consult or give a short course. I’d like to think that if
3 0.74128664 2080 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-28-Writing for free
Introduction: Max Read points to discussions by Cord Jefferson and Tim Krieger about people who write for free, thus depressing the wages of paid journalists. The topic interests me because I’m one of those people who writes for free, all the time. As a commenter wrote in response to Cord Jefferson’s article: It’s not just people who have inherited money, it’s also people who have “day jobs” to support themselves while they pursue dream jobs in fields like journalism, fiction writing, theater and music. In this case, I’m pursuing the dream job of blogging, but it’s the same basic idea. I actually enjoy doing this, which is more than can be said of Tim Kreider, who writes: I will freely admit that writing beats baling hay or going door-to-door for a living, but it’s still shockingly unenjoyable work. I’m lucky enough not to ever have had to bale hay or go door-to-door for a living, but I find writing to be enjoyable! So I can see how it can be hard for Kreider to compete wi
4 0.71888596 1105 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-08-Econ debate about prices at a fancy restaurant
Introduction: Felix Salmon writes : Economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have a problem with Grant Achatz’s pricing strategy at Next, where tickets are sold at a fixed price and are then free to be resold at an enormous markup on the secondary market . . . “It’s democratic in theory, but not in practice,” said Wolfers . . . If a person can sell a ticket for $3,000, the true cost of going to the restaurant — what an economist would call the opportunity cost — is $3000, because that’s how much money the person is giving up for the meal. Bloomberg’s Mark Whitehouse concludes that Next should “consider selling tickets to the highest bidder and giving the extra money to charity” . . . What strikes me is how weird this discussion is. Why should this restaurant owner have some sort of moral obligation to maximize his income and then donate to charity? For one thing, if he really did make more money off the deal he might just keep it. But more to the point, this sort of maximiz
5 0.718135 2025 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-15-The it-gets-me-so-angry-I-can’t-deal-with-it threshold
Introduction: I happened to be looking at Slate (I know, I know, but I’d already browsed Gawker and I was desperately avoiding doing real work) and came across this article by Alice Gregory entitled, “I Read Everything Janet Malcolm Ever Published. I’m in awe of her.” I too think Malcolm is an excellent writer, but (a) I’m not happy that she gets off the hook for faking quotes , and (b) I’m really really not happy with her apparent attempt to try to force a mistrial for a convicted killer. I just can’t get over that, for some reason. I can appreciate Picasso’s genius even though he beat his wives or whatever it was he did, I can enjoy the music of Jackson Browne, etc. But for some reason this Malcolm stuff sticks in my craw. There’s no deep meaning to this—I recognize it is a somewhat irrational attitude on my part, I just wanted to share it with you.
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1 0.94851321 185 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-04-Why does anyone support private macroeconomic forecasts?
Introduction: Tyler Cowen asks the above question. I don’t have a full answer, but, in the Economics section of A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences , Richard Clarida discusses in detail the ways that researchers have tried to estimate the extent to which government or private forecasts supply additional information.
2 0.91950399 2182 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-22-Spell-checking example demonstrates key aspects of Bayesian data analysis
Introduction: One of the new examples for the third edition of Bayesian Data Analysis is a spell-checking story. Here it is (just start at 2/3 down on the first page, with “Spelling correction”). I like this example—it demonstrates the Bayesian algebra, also gives a sense of the way that probability models (both “likelihood” and “prior”) are constructed from existing assumptions and data. The models aren’t just specified as a mathematical exercise, they represent some statement about reality. And the problem is close enough to our experience that we can consider ways in which the model can be criticized and improved, all in a simple example that has only three possibilities.
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Introduction: When you say that somebody else screwed up, you have to be extra careful you’re not getting things wrong yourself! A philosopher of science is quoted as having written, “it seems best to let this grubby affair rest in a footnote,” but I think it’s good for these things to be out in the open.
4 0.91115218 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
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Introduction: As a statistician I am particularly worried about the rhetorical power of anecdotes (even though I use them in my own reasoning; see discussion below). But much can be learned from a true anecdote. The rough edges—the places where the anecdote doesn’t fit your thesis—these are where you learn. We have recently had a discussion ( here and here ) of Karl Weick, a prominent scholar of business management who plagiarized a story and then went on to draw different lessons from the pilfered anecdote in several different publications published over many years. Setting aside an issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that, by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation. A full discussion follows. 1. The lost Hungarian soldiers Thomas Basbøll (who has the unusual (to me) job of “writing consultant” at the Copenhagen Business School) has been
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