andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-786 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and lives in Oxford). There was a brief description of quantum computing itself, which reminds me of the discussion we had a couple years ago under the heading, The laws of conditional probability are false (and the update here ). I don’t have anything new to say here; I’d just never heard of quantum computing before and it seemed relevant to our discussion. The uncertainty inherent in quantum computing seems closely related to Jouni’s idea of fully Bayesian computing , that uncertainty should be inherent in the computational structure rather than tacked on at the end. P.S. No, I’m not working on July 4th! This post is two months old, we just have a long waiting list of blog entries.
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2 Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. [sent-2, score-0.59]
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4 There was a brief description of quantum computing itself, which reminds me of the discussion we had a couple years ago under the heading, The laws of conditional probability are false (and the update here ). [sent-4, score-1.781]
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6 The uncertainty inherent in quantum computing seems closely related to Jouni’s idea of fully Bayesian computing , that uncertainty should be inherent in the computational structure rather than tacked on at the end. [sent-6, score-2.567]
7 This post is two months old, we just have a long waiting list of blog entries. [sent-10, score-0.321]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 786 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-04-Questions about quantum computing
Introduction: I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and lives in Oxford). There was a brief description of quantum computing itself, which reminds me of the discussion we had a couple years ago under the heading, The laws of conditional probability are false (and the update here ). I don’t have anything new to say here; I’d just never heard of quantum computing before and it seemed relevant to our discussion. The uncertainty inherent in quantum computing seems closely related to Jouni’s idea of fully Bayesian computing , that uncertainty should be inherent in the computational structure rather than tacked on at the end. P.S. No, I’m not working on July 4th! This post is two months old, we just have a long waiting list of blog entries.
2 0.23172516 1857 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-15-Does quantum uncertainty have a place in everyday applied statistics?
Introduction: Several months ago, Mike Betancourt and I wrote a discussion for the article, Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling?, by Emmanuel Pothos and Jerome Busemeyer, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. We didn’t say much, but it was a milestone for me because, with this article, BBS became the 100th journal I’d published in. Anyway, the full article with its 34 discussions just appeared in the journal . Here it is. What surprised me, in reading the full discussion, was how supportive the commentary was. Given the topic of Pothos and Busemeyer’s article, I was expecting the discussions to range from gentle mockery to outright abuse. The discussion that Mike and I wrote was moderately encouraging, and I was expecting this to fall on the extreme positive end of the spectrum. Actually, though, most of the discussions were positive, and only a couple were purely negative (those would be “Quantum models of cognition as Orwellian newspeak” by Michael Lee a
Introduction: James Robins, Tyler VanderWeele, and Richard Gill write : Neyman introduced a formal mathematical theory of counterfactual causation that now has become standard language in many quantitative disciplines, but not in physics. We use results on causal interaction and interference between treatments (derived under the Neyman theory) to give a simple new proof of a well-known result in quantum physics, namely, Bellís inequality. Now the predictions of quantum mechanics and the results of experiment both violate Bell’s inequality. In the remainder of the talk, we review the implications for a counterfactual theory of causation. Assuming with Einstein that faster than light (supraluminal) communication is not possible, one can view the Neyman theory of counterfactuals as falsified by experiment. . . . Is it safe for a quantitative discipline to rely on a counterfactual approach to causation, when our best confirmed physical theory falsifies their existence? I haven’t seen the talk
4 0.22101989 877 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-29-Applying quantum probability to political science
Introduction: As we’ve discussed on occasion, conditional probability (“Boltzmann statistics,” in physics jargon) is false at the atomic level. (It’s false at the macroscopic level too, but with discrepancies too small to be detected directly most of the time.) Occasionally I’ve speculated on how quantum probability (that is, the laws of uncertainty that hold in the real world) might be applied to social science research. I’ve made no progress but remain intrigued by the idea. Chris Zorn told me he recently went to a meeting on applications of non-Kolmogorovian / quantum probability to social & human phenomena. Here’s his paper (with Charles Smith), “Some Quantum-Like Features of Mass Politics in Two-Party Systems,” which begins: We [Smith and Zorn] expand the substantive terrain of QI’s reach by illuminating a body of political theory that to date has been elaborated in strictly classical language and formalisms but has complex features that seem to merit generalizations of the prob
5 0.12162332 793 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-09-R on the cloud
Introduction: Just as scientists should never really have to think much about statistics, I feel that, in an ideal world, statisticians would never have to worry about computing. In the real world, though, we have to spend a lot of time building our own tools. It would be great if we could routinely run R with speed and memory limitations being less of a concern. One suggestion that sometimes arises is to run things on “the cloud.” So I was interested upon receiving this email from Niklas Frassa: Time intensive calculations, as known from life science, finance or business intelligence, can now be processed at a whole new level of speed – in the Cloud. cloudnumbers.com provides an intuitive platform that enables everyone to run time consuming calculations on clusters with more than 1000 CPUs. So far, High Performance Computing has only been accessible for large corporations and universities leading to significant competitive disadvantages for small and medium-sized companies. With cloudnu
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same-blog 1 0.97279203 786 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-04-Questions about quantum computing
Introduction: I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and lives in Oxford). There was a brief description of quantum computing itself, which reminds me of the discussion we had a couple years ago under the heading, The laws of conditional probability are false (and the update here ). I don’t have anything new to say here; I’d just never heard of quantum computing before and it seemed relevant to our discussion. The uncertainty inherent in quantum computing seems closely related to Jouni’s idea of fully Bayesian computing , that uncertainty should be inherent in the computational structure rather than tacked on at the end. P.S. No, I’m not working on July 4th! This post is two months old, we just have a long waiting list of blog entries.
2 0.72667724 1857 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-15-Does quantum uncertainty have a place in everyday applied statistics?
Introduction: Several months ago, Mike Betancourt and I wrote a discussion for the article, Can quantum probability provide a new direction for cognitive modeling?, by Emmanuel Pothos and Jerome Busemeyer, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. We didn’t say much, but it was a milestone for me because, with this article, BBS became the 100th journal I’d published in. Anyway, the full article with its 34 discussions just appeared in the journal . Here it is. What surprised me, in reading the full discussion, was how supportive the commentary was. Given the topic of Pothos and Busemeyer’s article, I was expecting the discussions to range from gentle mockery to outright abuse. The discussion that Mike and I wrote was moderately encouraging, and I was expecting this to fall on the extreme positive end of the spectrum. Actually, though, most of the discussions were positive, and only a couple were purely negative (those would be “Quantum models of cognition as Orwellian newspeak” by Michael Lee a
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Introduction: Adam Gurri writes: Any chance you could do a post explaining Popper’s propensity theory of probability? I have never understood it. My reply: I’m a big fan of Popper (search this blog for details), especially as interpreted by Lakatos, but as far as I can tell, Popper’s theory of probability is hopeless. We’ve made a lot of progress on probability in the past 75 years, and I don’t see any real need to go back to the bad old days.
Introduction: James Robins, Tyler VanderWeele, and Richard Gill write : Neyman introduced a formal mathematical theory of counterfactual causation that now has become standard language in many quantitative disciplines, but not in physics. We use results on causal interaction and interference between treatments (derived under the Neyman theory) to give a simple new proof of a well-known result in quantum physics, namely, Bellís inequality. Now the predictions of quantum mechanics and the results of experiment both violate Bell’s inequality. In the remainder of the talk, we review the implications for a counterfactual theory of causation. Assuming with Einstein that faster than light (supraluminal) communication is not possible, one can view the Neyman theory of counterfactuals as falsified by experiment. . . . Is it safe for a quantitative discipline to rely on a counterfactual approach to causation, when our best confirmed physical theory falsifies their existence? I haven’t seen the talk
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Introduction: It was reported last year that the national lottery of Israel featured the exact same 6 numbers (out of 45) twice in the same month, and statistics professor Isaac Meilijson of Tel Aviv University was quoted as saying that “the incident of six numbers repeating themselves within a month is an event of once in 10,000 years.” I shouldn’t mock when it comes to mathematics–after all, I proved a false theorem once! (Or, to be precise, my collaborator and I published a false claim which we thought we’d proved, thus we thought was a theorem.) So let me retract the mockery and move, first to the mathematics and then to the statistics. First, how many possibilities are there in pick 6 out of 45? It’s (45*44*43*42*41*40)/6! = 8,145,060. Let’s call this number N. Second, what’s the probability that the same numbers repeat in a single calendar month? I’ve been told that the Israeli lottery has 2 draws per week, That’s 104/12=8.67 draws per month. Or maybe they skip some holiday
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Introduction: Skirant Vadali writes: I am writing to seek your help in building a community driven Q&A; website tentatively called called ‘Statistics Analysis’. I am neither a founder of this website nor do I have any financial stake in its success. By way of background to this website, please see Stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/) and Mathoverflow (http://mathoverflow.net/). Stackoverflow is a Q&A; website targeted at software developers and is designed to help them ask questions and get answers from other developers. Mathoverflow is a Q&A; website targeted at research mathematicians and is designed to help them ask and answer questions from other mathematicians across the world. The success of both these sites in helping their respective communities is a strong indicator that sites designed along these lines are very useful. The company that runs Stackoverflow (who also host Mathoverflow.net) has recently decided to develop other community driven websites for various other topic are
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Introduction: I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and lives in Oxford). There was a brief description of quantum computing itself, which reminds me of the discussion we had a couple years ago under the heading, The laws of conditional probability are false (and the update here ). I don’t have anything new to say here; I’d just never heard of quantum computing before and it seemed relevant to our discussion. The uncertainty inherent in quantum computing seems closely related to Jouni’s idea of fully Bayesian computing , that uncertainty should be inherent in the computational structure rather than tacked on at the end. P.S. No, I’m not working on July 4th! This post is two months old, we just have a long waiting list of blog entries.
3 0.96333146 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:
4 0.96182561 1686 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-21-Finite-population Anova calculations for models with interactions
Introduction: Jim Thomson writes: I wonder if you could provide some clarification on the correct way to calculate the finite-population standard deviations for interaction terms in your Bayesian approach to ANOVA (as explained in your 2005 paper, and Gelman and Hill 2007). I understand that it is the SD of the constrained batch coefficients that is of interest, but in most WinBUGS examples I have seen, the SDs are all calculated directly as sd.fin<-sd(beta.main[]) for main effects and sd(beta.int[,]) for interaction effects, where beta.main and beta.int are the unconstrained coefficients, e.g. beta.int[i,j]~dnorm(0,tau). For main effects, I can see that it makes no difference, since the constrained value is calculated by subtracting the mean, and sd(B[]) = sd(B[]-mean(B[])). But the conventional sum-to-zero constraint for interaction terms in linear models is more complicated than subtracting the mean (there are only (n1-1)*(n2-1) free coefficients for an interaction b/w factors with n1 a
Introduction: Mark Palko points me to a news article by Zack Beauchamp on Jason Richwine, the recent Ph.D. graduate from Harvard’s policy school who left the conservative Heritage Foundation after it came out that his Ph.D. thesis was said to be all about the low IQ’s of Hispanic immigrants. Heritage and others apparently thought this association could discredit their anti-immigration-reform position. Richwine’s mentor Charles Murray was unhappy about the whole episode. Beauchamp’s article is worth reading in that it provides some interesting background, in particular by getting into the details of the Ph.D. review process. In a sense, Beauchamp is too harsh. Flawed Ph.D. theses get published all the time. I’d say that most Ph.D. theses I’ve seen are flawed: usually the plan is to get the papers into shape later, when submitting them to journals. If a student doesn’t go into academia, the thesis typically just sits there and is rarely followed up on. I don’t know the statistics o
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