andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-831 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I was distinguished for over three years and now am renowned. For most of the past year and a half, though, I was neither. Who am I? First person who guesses the right answer in comments gets a free copy of Jenny Davidson’s book, “Breeding”–as soon as she sends it to me, as she promised a couple years ago! You’ll get an extra prize if you can express the answer in an indirect way, without using the person’s name or being too obvious about it but making the identification clear enough that I know you know the answer. P.S. Reading Wikipedia edits . . . that’s a new low in time-wasting!
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same-blog 1 1.0 831 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-30-A Wikipedia riddle!
Introduction: I was distinguished for over three years and now am renowned. For most of the past year and a half, though, I was neither. Who am I? First person who guesses the right answer in comments gets a free copy of Jenny Davidson’s book, “Breeding”–as soon as she sends it to me, as she promised a couple years ago! You’ll get an extra prize if you can express the answer in an indirect way, without using the person’s name or being too obvious about it but making the identification clear enough that I know you know the answer. P.S. Reading Wikipedia edits . . . that’s a new low in time-wasting!
Introduction: For “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership” at Columbia College. Reading Jenny’s remarks (“my hugest and most helpful pool of colleagues was to be found not among the ranks of my fellow faculty but in the classroom. . . . we shared a sense of the excitement of the enterprise on which we were all embarked”) reminds me of the comment Seth made once, that the usual goal of university teaching is to make the students into carbon copies of the instructor, and that he found it to me much better to make use of the students’ unique strengths. This can’t always be true–for example, in learning to speak a foreign language, I just want to be able to do it, and my own experiences in other domains is not so relevant. But for a worldly subject such as literature or statistics or political science, then, yes, I do think it would be good for students to get involved and use their own knowledge and experiences. One other statement of Jenny’s caught my eye. She wrote: I [Je
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Introduction: I was curious so I ordered a used copy. It was pretty good. It fit in my pocket and I read it on the plane. It was written in a bland, spare manner, not worth reading for any direct insights it would give into human nature, but the plot moved along. And the background material was interesting in the window it gave into the society of the 1950s. It was fun to read a book of pulp fiction that didn’t have any dead bodies in it. I wonder what Jenny Davidson would think of it.
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Introduction: I was stunned this from Jenny Davidson about mystery writers: The crime fiction community is smart and adult and welcoming, and so many good books are being written (Lee Child was mentioning his peer group – i.e. they were the new kids around the same tie – being Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman – the list speaks for itself) . . . Why was I stunned? Because just a few days earlier I had a look at a book by Robert Crais. It just happened that Phil, when he was visiting, had finished this book (which he described as “pretty good”) and left it with me so he wouldn’t have to take it back with him. I’d never heard of Crais, but it had pretty amazing blurbs on the cover and Phil recommended it, so I took a look. It was bad. From page 1 it was bad. It was like a bad cop show. I could see the seams where the sentences were stitched together. I could see how somebody might like this sort of book, but I certainly can’t understand the blurbs or the i
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same-blog 1 0.9821617 831 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-30-A Wikipedia riddle!
Introduction: I was distinguished for over three years and now am renowned. For most of the past year and a half, though, I was neither. Who am I? First person who guesses the right answer in comments gets a free copy of Jenny Davidson’s book, “Breeding”–as soon as she sends it to me, as she promised a couple years ago! You’ll get an extra prize if you can express the answer in an indirect way, without using the person’s name or being too obvious about it but making the identification clear enough that I know you know the answer. P.S. Reading Wikipedia edits . . . that’s a new low in time-wasting!
2 0.84366435 1222 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-20-5 books book
Introduction: Sophie Roell, who interviewed me for 5books (background here ), reports that 5books has become a book. Or, to be precise, that they have released a collection of the 5books interviews as an ebook . Interviewees include me, some people I’d never heard of, and a bunch of legitimate bigshots such as Ian McEwen and Steven Pinker. I’d say it’s fun and often unexpected bathroom reading, but then you’d need a book tablet (a “kindle”? What do you call these things generically?) in that special room. But then again, maybe you already do! P.S. You might be also interested in this list (from a few years ago). Comments are closed on that entry (I know there’s a way to get them unclosed but I can’t figure out how), so feel free to leave your comments/suggestions here if you want to opine on the best nonfiction books.
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Introduction: Steve Hsu, who started off this discussion, had some comments on my speculations on the personality of John von Neumann and others. Steve writes: I [Hsu] actually knew Feynman a bit when I was an undergrad, and found him to be very nice to students. Since then I have heard quite a few stories from people in theoretical physics which emphasize his nastier side, and I think in the end he was quite a complicated person like everyone else. There are a couple of pseudo-biographies of vN, but none as high quality as, e.g., Gleick’s book on Feynman or Hodges book about Turing. (Gleick studied physics as an undergrad at Harvard, and Hodges is a PhD in mathematical physics — pretty rare backgrounds for biographers!) For example, as mentioned on the comment thread to your post, Steve Heims wrote a book about both vN and Wiener (!), and Norman Macrae wrote a biography of vN. Both books are worth reading, but I think neither really do him justice. The breadth of vN’s work is just too m
Introduction: Our apartment is from earlier in the century, so I can’t give Tyler Cowen’s first answer , but, after that, I follow him in thinking of the several books I have from that decade. Beyond that, lemme think . . . We occasionally play Risk , and our set dates from the 50s. Some kitchen implements (a mixmaster, a couple of cookbooks, who knows which old bowls, forks, etc). Probably some of the furniture, although I don’t know which. Probably some of the items in our building (the boiler?) What else, I wonder? There are probably a few things I’m forgetting. 50-60 years is a long time, I guess. P.S. to the commenters: I’m taking the question to refer to things manufactured in the 1950s and not before!
5 0.73474288 392 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-03-Taleb + 3.5 years
Introduction: I recently had the occasion to reread my review of The Black Swan, from April 2007. It was fun reading my review (and also this pre-review ; “nothing useful escapes from a blackbody,” indeed). It was like a greatest hits of all my pet ideas that I’ve never published. Looking back, I realize that Taleb really was right about a lot of things. Now that the financial crisis has happened, we tend to forget that the experts who Taleb bashes were not always reasonable at all. Here’s what I wrote in my review, three and a half years ago: On page 19, Taleb refers to the usual investment strategy (which I suppose I actually use myself) as “picking pennies in front of a steamroller.” That’s a cute phrase; did he come up with it? I’m also reminded of the famous Martingale betting system. Several years ago in a university library I came across a charming book by Maxim (of gun fame) where he went through chapter after chapter demolishing the Martingale system. (For those who don’t kno
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same-blog 1 0.95152569 831 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-30-A Wikipedia riddle!
Introduction: I was distinguished for over three years and now am renowned. For most of the past year and a half, though, I was neither. Who am I? First person who guesses the right answer in comments gets a free copy of Jenny Davidson’s book, “Breeding”–as soon as she sends it to me, as she promised a couple years ago! You’ll get an extra prize if you can express the answer in an indirect way, without using the person’s name or being too obvious about it but making the identification clear enough that I know you know the answer. P.S. Reading Wikipedia edits . . . that’s a new low in time-wasting!
Introduction: Gur Huberman points to an article on the financial crisis by Bethany McLean, who writes : lthough our understanding of what instigated the 2008 global financial crisis remains at best incomplete, there are a few widely agreed upon contributing factors. One of them is a 2004 rule change by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that allowed investment banks to load up on leverage. This disastrous decision has been cited by a host of prominent economists, including Princeton professor and former Federal Reserve Vice-Chairman Alan Blinder and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. It has even been immortalized in Hollywood, figuring into the dark financial narrative that propelled the Academy Award-winning film Inside Job. . . . Here’s just one problem with this story line: It’s not true. Nor is it hard to prove that. Look at the historical leverage of the big five investment banks — Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. The Government Accou
3 0.94837654 480 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-21-Instead of “confidence interval,” let’s say “uncertainty interval”
Introduction: I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the term “confidence interval,” for several reasons: - The well-known difficulties in interpretation (officially the confidence statement can be interpreted only on average, but people typically implicitly give the Bayesian interpretation to each case), - The ambiguity between confidence intervals and predictive intervals. (See the footnote in BDA where we discuss the difference between “inference” and “prediction” in the classical framework.) - The awkwardness of explaining that confidence intervals are big in noisy situations where you have less confidence, and confidence intervals are small when you have more confidence. So here’s my proposal. Let’s use the term “uncertainty interval” instead. The uncertainty interval tells you how much uncertainty you have. That works pretty well, I think. P.S. As of this writing, “confidence interval” outGoogles “uncertainty interval” by the huge margin of 9.5 million to 54000. So we
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Introduction: Two positions open in the statistics group at the NYU education school. If you get the job, you get to work with Jennifer HIll! One position is a postdoctoral fellowship, and the other is a visiting professorship. The latter position requires “the demonstrated ability to develop a nationally recognized research program,” which seems like a lot to ask for a visiting professor. Do they expect the visiting prof to develop a nationally recognized research program and then leave it there at NYU after the visit is over? In any case, Jennifer and her colleagues are doing excellent work, both applied and methodological, and this seems like a great opportunity.
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