andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-805 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: OK, the 30 days of statistics are over. I’ll still be posting regularly on statistical topics, but now it will be mixed in with everything else, as before. Here’s what I put on the sister blogs in the past month: 1. How to write an entire report with fake data. 2. “Life getting shorter for women in hundreds of U.S. counties”: I’d like to see a graph of relative change in death rates, with age on the x-axis. 3. “Not a choice” != “genetic” . 4. Remember when I said I’d never again post on albedo? I was lying . 5. Update on Arrow’s theorem. It’s a Swiss thing , you wouldn’t understand. 6. Dan Ariely can’t read, but don’t blame Johnson and Goldstein. 7. My co-blogger endorses college scholarships for bowling . Which reminds me that my friends and I did “intramural bowling” in high school to get out of going to gym class. Nobody paid us. We even had to rent the shoes! 8. The quest for http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/10/10/my-colleague-casey-mu
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1 I’ll still be posting regularly on statistical topics, but now it will be mixed in with everything else, as before. [sent-2, score-0.177]
2 Here’s what I put on the sister blogs in the past month: 1. [sent-3, score-0.081]
3 “Life getting shorter for women in hundreds of U. [sent-6, score-0.185]
4 counties”: I’d like to see a graph of relative change in death rates, with age on the x-axis. [sent-8, score-0.085]
5 Dan Ariely can’t read, but don’t blame Johnson and Goldstein. [sent-19, score-0.085]
6 My co-blogger endorses college scholarships for bowling . [sent-21, score-0.524]
7 Which reminds me that my friends and I did “intramural bowling” in high school to get out of going to gym class. [sent-22, score-0.13]
8 For some reason, the commenters got all worked up about the dude with the two kids and completely ignored the lady who had to sell her summer home in the Hamptons . [sent-29, score-0.497]
9 The most outrageous parts of a story are the parts that don’t even attract attention. [sent-31, score-0.397]
10 Do academic economists really not talk about economic factors when they talk about academic jobs in economics? [sent-33, score-0.422]
11 The fallacy of composition in brownstone Brooklyn. [sent-35, score-0.201]
12 No, the federal budget is not funded by taking money from poor people . [sent-37, score-0.265]
13 Jim Davis has some pretty controversial opinions. [sent-43, score-0.086]
14 Political scientist links to political scientist linking to political scientist claiming political science is irrelevant. [sent-45, score-1.197]
15 8324589480035 quadrillion but they did us the favor of rounding. [sent-51, score-0.288]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 805 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-16-Hey–here’s what you missed in the past 30 days!
Introduction: OK, the 30 days of statistics are over. I’ll still be posting regularly on statistical topics, but now it will be mixed in with everything else, as before. Here’s what I put on the sister blogs in the past month: 1. How to write an entire report with fake data. 2. “Life getting shorter for women in hundreds of U.S. counties”: I’d like to see a graph of relative change in death rates, with age on the x-axis. 3. “Not a choice” != “genetic” . 4. Remember when I said I’d never again post on albedo? I was lying . 5. Update on Arrow’s theorem. It’s a Swiss thing , you wouldn’t understand. 6. Dan Ariely can’t read, but don’t blame Johnson and Goldstein. 7. My co-blogger endorses college scholarships for bowling . Which reminds me that my friends and I did “intramural bowling” in high school to get out of going to gym class. Nobody paid us. We even had to rent the shoes! 8. The quest for http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/10/10/my-colleague-casey-mu
2 0.12268898 645 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
Introduction: We all have opinions about the federal budget and how it should be spent. Infrequently, those opinions are informed by some knowledge about where the money actually goes. It turns out that most people don’t have a clue. What about you? Here, take this poll/quiz and then compare your answers to (1) what other people said, in a CNN poll that asked about these same items and (2) compare your answers to the real answers. Quiz is below the fold. The questions below are from a CNN poll. ======== Think about all the money that the federal government spent last year. I’m going to name a few federal programs and for each one, I’d like you to estimate what percentage of the federal government’s budget last year was spent on each of those programs. Medicare — the federal health program for the elderly Medicaid — the federal health program for the poor Social Security Military spending by the Department of Defense Aid to foreign countries for international development
3 0.1125311 806 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-17-6 links
Introduction: The Browser asked me to recommend 6 articles for their readers. Here’s what I came up with. I really wanted to link to this one but it wouldn’t mean much to people who don’t know New York. I also recommended this (if you’ll forgive my reference to bowling), but I think it was too much of a primary source for their taste.
4 0.088046551 1629 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-18-It happened in Connecticut
Introduction: From the sister blog, some reasons why the political reaction might be different this time.
5 0.087705851 675 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-22-Arrow’s other theorem
Introduction: I received the following email from someone who’d like to remain anonymous: Lately I [the anonymous correspondent] witnessed that Bruno Frey has published two articles in two well known referreed journals on the Titanic disaster that try to explain survival rates of passenger on board. The articles were published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives and Rationality & Society . While looking up the name of the second journal where I stumbled across the article I even saw that they put the message in a third journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of America . To say it in Sopranos like style – with all due respect, I know Bruno Frey from conferences, I really appreciate his take on economics as a social science and he has really published more interesting stuff that most economists ever will. But putting the same message into three journals gives me headaches for at least two reasons: 1) When building a track record and scientific rep
6 0.087558493 1388 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-22-Americans think economy isn’t so bad in their city but is crappy nationally and globally
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8 0.085002571 1937 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-13-Meritocracy rerun
9 0.084391423 548 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-01-What goes around . . .
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11 0.081433848 604 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-08-More on the missing conservative psychology researchers
12 0.081340738 1884 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-05-A story of fake-data checking being used to shoot down a flawed analysis at the Farm Credit Agency
13 0.081274778 1484 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-05-Two exciting movie ideas: “Second Chance U” and “The New Dirty Dozen”
14 0.079327732 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
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16 0.078412056 2236 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-07-Selection bias in the reporting of shaky research
17 0.077622958 1832 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The blogroll
18 0.07543651 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
19 0.07539887 1086 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-27-The most dangerous jobs in America
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same-blog 1 0.97470152 805 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-16-Hey–here’s what you missed in the past 30 days!
Introduction: OK, the 30 days of statistics are over. I’ll still be posting regularly on statistical topics, but now it will be mixed in with everything else, as before. Here’s what I put on the sister blogs in the past month: 1. How to write an entire report with fake data. 2. “Life getting shorter for women in hundreds of U.S. counties”: I’d like to see a graph of relative change in death rates, with age on the x-axis. 3. “Not a choice” != “genetic” . 4. Remember when I said I’d never again post on albedo? I was lying . 5. Update on Arrow’s theorem. It’s a Swiss thing , you wouldn’t understand. 6. Dan Ariely can’t read, but don’t blame Johnson and Goldstein. 7. My co-blogger endorses college scholarships for bowling . Which reminds me that my friends and I did “intramural bowling” in high school to get out of going to gym class. Nobody paid us. We even had to rent the shoes! 8. The quest for http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/10/10/my-colleague-casey-mu
2 0.71800572 1039 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-02-I just flew in from the econ seminar, and boy are my arms tired
Introduction: I’ve heard all sorts of scare stories of what it’s like to speak in an academic economics seminar: they’re rude, they interrupt constantly, they don’t let you get through three slides in an hour, etc. But whenever I’ve actually spoke in an economics department, the people have been polite and well-behaved, really it’s been like any other seminar. I mentioned this to some people awhile ago and they said that the nasty-economist thing only happens in the top departments. I’d spoken at Columbia (which, if not at the very top, is still respectable), but that was in the political economy seminar and I’m a political scientist, so maybe they were nice to me because I’m local. And the other econ departments where I’d spoken were in Europe (maybe they’re nicer there) or at non-elite institutions in the U.S. So I called my friend at Harvard econ, told him my story, and asked if I could speak there. He duly booked me for the Harvard-MIT econometrics seminar. I spoke at the seminar,
3 0.71797562 321 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-05-Racism!
Introduction: Last night I spoke at the Columbia Club of New York, along with some of my political science colleagues, in a panel about politics, the economy, and the forthcoming election. The discussion was fine . . . until one guy in the audience accused us of bias based on what he imputed as our ethnicity. One of the panelists replied by asking the questioner what of all the things we had said was biased, and the questioner couldn’t actually supply any examples. It makes sense that the questioner couldn’t come up with a single example of bias on our part, considering that we were actually presenting facts . At some level, the questioner’s imputation of our ethnicity and accusation of bias isn’t so horrible. When talking with my friends, I engage in casual ethnic stereotyping all the time–hey, it’s a free country!–and one can certainly make the statistical argument that you can guess people’s ethnicities from their names, appearance, and speech patterns, and in turn you can infer a lot
4 0.70241892 698 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-05-Shocking but not surprising
Introduction: Much-honored playwright Tony Kushner was set to receive one more honor–a degree from John Jay College–but it was suddenly taken away from him on an 11-1 vote of the trustees of the City University of New York. This was the first rejection of an honorary degree nomination since 1961. The news article focuses on one trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime political aide, who opposed Kushner’s honorary degree, but to me the relevant point is that the committee as a whole voted 11-1 to ding him. Kusnher said, “I’m sickened,” he added, “that this is happening in New York City. Shocked, really.” I can see why he’s shocked, but perhaps it’s not so surprising that it’s happening in NYC. Recall the famous incident from 1940 in which Bertrand Russell was invited and then uninvited to teach at City College. The problem that time was Russell’s views on free love (as they called it back then). There seems to be a long tradition of city college officials being will
5 0.69483858 1417 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-15-Some decision analysis problems are pretty easy, no?
Introduction: Cassie Murdoch reports : A 47-year-old woman in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, got behind the wheel of her car after having a bit too much to drink, but instead of wreaking havoc on the road, she ended up lodged in a sand trap at a local golf course. Why? Because her GPS made her do it—obviously! She said the GPS told her to turn left, and she did, right into a cornfield. That didn’t faze her, and she just kept on going until she ended up on the golf course and got stuck in the sand. There were people on the course at the time, but thankfully nobody was injured. Police found a cup full of alcohol in her car and arrested her for driving drunk. Here’s the punchline: This is the fourth time she’s been arrested for a DUI. Assuming this story is accurate, I guess they don’t have one of those “three strikes” laws in Massachusetts? Personally, I’m a lot more afraid of a dangerous driver than of some drug dealer. I’d think a simple cost-benefit calculation would recommend taking away
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8 0.68526709 1007 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-13-At last, treated with the disrespect that I deserve
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11 0.67117345 1370 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-07-Duncan Watts and the Titanic
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19 0.65296656 1600 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83
20 0.64942855 2354 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-30-Mmm, statistical significance . . . Evilicious!
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen hypothesizes a “dogmatism portfolio” or a “quota of dogmatism”: in his words, If you’re very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. OK, well “may be” is pretty vague. There’s not really anything to disagree with, yet. But then Cowen continues: There’s a lesson here. If you wish to be a more open-minded thinker, adhere to some extreme and perhaps unreasonable fandoms, the more firmly believed the better and the more obscure the area the better. This will help fulfill your dogmatism quota, yet without much skewing your more important beliefs. He seems to be making a testable prediction here, that levels of dogmatism on two randomly chosen issues should be negatively correlated. I guess I should call this “almost testable,” as it still requires an issue-by-issue measure of dogmatism. (Is it dogmatic to believe that there was this guy called Jesus who walked on water . . . or is it dogmatic to say that Jesus didn’t walk on water and
same-blog 2 0.94553596 805 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-16-Hey–here’s what you missed in the past 30 days!
Introduction: OK, the 30 days of statistics are over. I’ll still be posting regularly on statistical topics, but now it will be mixed in with everything else, as before. Here’s what I put on the sister blogs in the past month: 1. How to write an entire report with fake data. 2. “Life getting shorter for women in hundreds of U.S. counties”: I’d like to see a graph of relative change in death rates, with age on the x-axis. 3. “Not a choice” != “genetic” . 4. Remember when I said I’d never again post on albedo? I was lying . 5. Update on Arrow’s theorem. It’s a Swiss thing , you wouldn’t understand. 6. Dan Ariely can’t read, but don’t blame Johnson and Goldstein. 7. My co-blogger endorses college scholarships for bowling . Which reminds me that my friends and I did “intramural bowling” in high school to get out of going to gym class. Nobody paid us. We even had to rent the shoes! 8. The quest for http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/10/10/my-colleague-casey-mu
3 0.93465632 646 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Graphical insights into the safety of cycling.
Introduction: This article by Thomas Crag, at Copenhagenize, is marred by reliance on old data, but it’s so full of informative graphical displays — most of them not made by the author, I think — that it’s hard to pick just one. But here ya go. This figure shows fatalities (among cyclists) versus distance cycled, with a point for each year…unfortunately ending in way back in 1998, but still: This is a good alternative to the more common choice for this sort of plot, which would be overlaying curves of fatalities vs time and distance cycled vs time. The article also explicitly discusses the fact, previously discussed on this blog , that it’s misleading, to the point of being wrong in most contexts, to compare the safety of walking vs cycling vs driving by looking at the casualty or fatality rate per kilometer . Often, as in this article, the question of interest is something like, if more people switched from driving to cycling, how many more or fewer people would die? Obviously, if peo
4 0.92675626 1587 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-21-Red state blue state, or, states and counties are not persons
Introduction: Tyler Cowen points to this news article by Lauren Sandler: Stunningly, the postponement of marriage and parenting — the factors that shrink the birth rate — is the very best predictor of a person’s politics in the United States, over even income and education levels, a Belgian demographer named Ron Lesthaeghe [and coauthor Lisa Neidert] has discovered . Larger family size in America correlates to early marriage and childbirth, lower women’s employment, and opposition to gay rights — all social factors that lead voters to see red. All the analysis in the linked paper is at the state and county level. That’s fine but this is not going to tell you what is a “predictor of a person’s politics.” Cowen labels his post “Sentences to ponder,” and what I want to ponder is that people are so quick to jump from aggregate to individual patterns. And, yes, I know that aggregate patterns are related to individual patterns but they’re not the same. In particular, from the evidence we’
5 0.92579615 1827 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-27-Continued fractions!!
Introduction: Upon reading this note by John Cook on continued fractions, I wrote: If you like continued fractions, I recommend you read the relevant parts of the classic Numerical Methods That Work. The details are probably obsolete but it’s fun reading (at least, if you think that sort of thing is fun to read). I then looked up Acton in Wikipedia and was surprised to see he’s still alive. And he wrote a second book (published at the age of 77!). I wonder if it’s any good. It’s sobering to read Numerical Methods That Work: it’s so wonderful and so readable, yet in this modern era there’s really not much reason to read it. Perhaps William Goldman (hey, I checked: he’s still alive too!) or some equivalent could prepare a 50-page “good parts” version that could be still be useful as a basic textbook.
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