andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-854 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Torkild Hovde Lyngstad writes: I wondered what your reaction would be to this paper from a recent issue of European Political Science. It came out already in March this year, so you might have seen it or even commented on it before. Is is a joke at the expense of the whole polisci discipline, a joke the Editors did not catch, or the sequel to the Sokal affair, just with quanto social science as the target? My reply: Yes, several people pointed me to this article. I don’t think it’s a hoax, it’s more of a joke: the author is making the point that with fancy statistics you can discover all sorts of patterns that don’t make sense. The implication, I believe, is that many patterns that social scientists do find through statistical analysis are not actually meaningful. I agree with this point, which could be even more pithily stated as “correlation does not imply causation.” I am irritated, however, by the singling out of multilevel models here, as the point could be mad
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1 Torkild Hovde Lyngstad writes: I wondered what your reaction would be to this paper from a recent issue of European Political Science. [sent-1, score-0.309]
2 It came out already in March this year, so you might have seen it or even commented on it before. [sent-2, score-0.199]
3 Is is a joke at the expense of the whole polisci discipline, a joke the Editors did not catch, or the sequel to the Sokal affair, just with quanto social science as the target? [sent-3, score-1.242]
4 My reply: Yes, several people pointed me to this article. [sent-4, score-0.081]
5 I don’t think it’s a hoax, it’s more of a joke: the author is making the point that with fancy statistics you can discover all sorts of patterns that don’t make sense. [sent-5, score-0.741]
6 The implication, I believe, is that many patterns that social scientists do find through statistical analysis are not actually meaningful. [sent-6, score-0.532]
7 I agree with this point, which could be even more pithily stated as “correlation does not imply causation. [sent-7, score-0.43]
8 ” I am irritated, however, by the singling out of multilevel models here, as the point could be made just as well using a simple correlation. [sent-8, score-0.575]
9 As my French friend said to me many years ago when I asked her what she thought of the Pink Panther movies, it’s not that I mind that this article makes fun of multilevel models, I just don’t find it funny. [sent-9, score-0.679]
10 Then again, I didn’t try to publish that one in a real journal, hence I was able to get to the point right away. [sent-11, score-0.391]
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Introduction: Hey, and I did it in less than 140 characters! The above was my response to this item which David Hogg forwarded to me. The next thing you know, people are going to claim that women are three times as likely to wear red pink when . . . Naaah, forget about it, that would never happen. Hmmm, I think the above is not so savvy of me, to just go around insulting a whole bunch of people. So let me just say that becoming numerate is not as easy as it might seem. All of us can be gullible in areas outside of our expertise. Indeed, I’ve fallen for the occasional April Fool’s gag myself. And, maybe it’s not really right for me to say that “Twitter sucks.” Sure, the downside of Twitter is that people can just pass along a silly joke, not realizing it’s a joke at all. But the upside is, I hope, that once people have committed themselves and then realize they were mistaken, they’ll think harder the next time they see something like that. I hope the same thing goes with the “women
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Introduction: Alex Hoffman points me to this interview by Dylan Matthews of education researcher Thomas Kane, who at one point says, Once you corrected for measurement error, a teacher’s score on their chosen videos and on their unchosen videos were correlated at 1. They were perfectly correlated. Hoffman asks, “What do you think? Do you think that just maybe, perhaps, it’s possible we aught to consider, I’m just throwing out the possibility that it might be that the procedure for correcting measurement error might, you now, be a little too strong?” I don’t know exactly what’s happening here, but it might be something that I’ve seen on occasion when fitting multilevel models using a point estimate for the group-level variance. It goes like this: measurement-error models are multilevel models, they involve the estimation of a distribution of a latent variable. When fitting multilevel models, it is possible to estimate the group-level variance to be zero, even though the group-level varia
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Introduction: As a statistician, I was trained to think of randomized experimentation as representing the gold standard of knowledge in the social sciences, and, despite having seen occasional arguments to the contrary, I still hold that view, expressed pithily by Box, Hunter, and Hunter (1978) that “To find out what happens when you change something, it is necessary to change it.” At the same time, in my capacity as a social scientist, I’ve published many applied research papers, almost none of which have used experimental data. In the present article, I’ll address the following questions: 1. Why do I agree with the consensus characterization of randomized experimentation as a gold standard? 2. Given point 1 above, why does almost all my research use observational data? In confronting these issues, we must consider some general issues in the strategy of social science research. We also take from the psychology methods literature a more nuanced perspective that considers several differen
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Introduction: The list includes “hunting” but not “fishing,” so that’s cool. I wonder how they’d feel about a question involving different cuts of meat. In any case, I’m happy to see that “Bayes” is not on the banned list. P.S. Russell explains .
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Introduction: Dietrich Stoyan writes: I asked the IMS people for an expert in statistics of voting/elections and they wrote me your name. I am a statistician, but never worked in the field voting/elections. It was my son-in-law who asked me for statistical theories in that field. He posed in particular the following problem: The aim of the voting is to come to a ranking of c candidates. Every vote is a permutation of these c candidates. The problem is to have probability distributions in the set of all permutations of c elements. Are there theories for such distributions? I should be very grateful for a fast answer with hints to literature. (I confess that I do not know your books.) My reply: Rather than trying to model the ranks directly, I’d recommend modeling a latent continuous outcome which then implies a distribution on ranks, if the ranks are of interest. There are lots of distributions of c-dimensional continuous outcomes. In political science, the usual way to start is
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Introduction: By popular demand, here’s my R script for the time-use graphs : # The data a1 <- c(4.2,3.2,11.1,1.3,2.2,2.0) a2 <- c(3.9,3.2,10.0,0.8,3.1,3.1) a3 <- c(6.3,2.5,9.8,0.9,2.2,2.4) a4 <- c(4.4,3.1,9.8,0.8,3.3,2.7) a5 <- c(4.8,3.0,9.9,0.7,3.3,2.4) a6 <- c(4.0,3.4,10.5,0.7,3.3,2.1) a <- rbind(a1,a2,a3,a4,a5,a6) avg <- colMeans (a) avg.array <- t (array (avg, rev(dim(a)))) diff <- a - avg.array country.name <- c("France", "Germany", "Japan", "Britain", "USA", "Turkey") # The line plots par (mfrow=c(2,3), mar=c(4,4,2,.5), mgp=c(2,.7,0), tck=-.02, oma=c(3,0,4,0), bg="gray96", fg="gray30") for (i in 1:6){ plot (c(1,6), c(-1,1.7), xlab="", ylab="", xaxt="n", yaxt="n", bty="l", type="n") lines (1:6, diff[i,], col="blue") points (1:6, diff[i,], pch=19, col="black") if (i>3){ axis (1, c(1,3,5), c ("Work,\nstudy", "Eat,\nsleep", "Leisure"), mgp=c(2,1.5,0), tck=0, cex.axis=1.2) axis (1, c(2,4,6), c ("Unpaid\nwork", "Personal\nCare", "Other"), mgp=c(2,1.5,0),
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