andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-949 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: In a review of the movie Moneyball, David Denby writes : Lewis, Miller, and the screenwriters may have gone too far in their gleeful celebration of Beane and their denigration of scouts. Beane has never made it to the World Series (in 2002, the A’s were eliminated in the playoffs by the Minnesota Twins). Oakland has had a mediocre record for the past five years, and it’s finishing a lousy season this year. Success in baseball remains something of a mystery (though pots of money continue to help the Yankees and the Sox). Sabermetrics is a fascinating approach to winning, but it’s one of many approaches, not the ultimate answer. It can’t explain why some teams with the right stats catch fire and others fade. In the movie, the scouts say some dumb stuff, but they know that statistics, no matter how they’re broken down, can’t predict everything. Denby generally likes the movie and is supportive of its message, so I shouldn’t really complain, but . . . the above passage is just s
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1 In a review of the movie Moneyball, David Denby writes : Lewis, Miller, and the screenwriters may have gone too far in their gleeful celebration of Beane and their denigration of scouts. [sent-1, score-0.481]
2 Beane has never made it to the World Series (in 2002, the A’s were eliminated in the playoffs by the Minnesota Twins). [sent-2, score-0.081]
3 Oakland has had a mediocre record for the past five years, and it’s finishing a lousy season this year. [sent-3, score-0.605]
4 Success in baseball remains something of a mystery (though pots of money continue to help the Yankees and the Sox). [sent-4, score-0.222]
5 It can’t explain why some teams with the right stats catch fire and others fade. [sent-6, score-0.15]
6 In the movie, the scouts say some dumb stuff, but they know that statistics, no matter how they’re broken down, can’t predict everything. [sent-7, score-0.241]
7 Denby generally likes the movie and is supportive of its message, so I shouldn’t really complain, but . [sent-8, score-0.323]
8 Nobody is saying that statistics can explain everything. [sent-12, score-0.081]
9 In fact, Bill James wrote a lot about prediction error (for example, his so-called Plexiglass principle). [sent-13, score-0.067]
10 Beyond this, the ideas of Moneyball are anything but a secret, so there’s no reason you’d think that Moneyball tactics would help the A’s after the ideas had been widely spread and accepted. [sent-14, score-0.289]
11 I mean, really: Oakland is “finishing a lousy season this year” and that’s supposed to be evidence that sabermetrics isn’t all that? [sent-15, score-0.568]
12 The real question, I suppose, is why I read the review at all, given that (a) Denby is neither an insightful reviewer nor an interesting writer, and (b) I almost never go to the movies. [sent-18, score-0.361]
13 The real real question, I suppose, is why I bothered to blog this at all (beyond the usual explanation that I have a lot of things to procrastinate this week). [sent-23, score-0.334]
14 As I’ve written before, you can learn a lot about a person by looking at what irritates him or her. [sent-24, score-0.234]
15 First, as a statistician I don’t like to see statistics disparaged or overly hyped. [sent-26, score-0.164]
16 ) Second, I hate hate hate that “humanistic” attitude in which people without scientific training try to justify their existence by going all mystical on us. [sent-28, score-0.707]
17 It doesn’t have to be that way—John Updike, for example, was able to appreciate the mystery of life without disparaging science. [sent-29, score-0.247]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 949 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-10-Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Introduction: In a review of the movie Moneyball, David Denby writes : Lewis, Miller, and the screenwriters may have gone too far in their gleeful celebration of Beane and their denigration of scouts. Beane has never made it to the World Series (in 2002, the A’s were eliminated in the playoffs by the Minnesota Twins). Oakland has had a mediocre record for the past five years, and it’s finishing a lousy season this year. Success in baseball remains something of a mystery (though pots of money continue to help the Yankees and the Sox). Sabermetrics is a fascinating approach to winning, but it’s one of many approaches, not the ultimate answer. It can’t explain why some teams with the right stats catch fire and others fade. In the movie, the scouts say some dumb stuff, but they know that statistics, no matter how they’re broken down, can’t predict everything. Denby generally likes the movie and is supportive of its message, so I shouldn’t really complain, but . . . the above passage is just s
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Introduction: I get suspicious when I hear unsourced claims that unnamed experts somewhere are making foolish statements. For example, I recently came across this, from a Super Bowl-themed article from 2006 by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt: As it happens, there is one betting strategy that will routinely beat a bookie, and you don’t even have to be smart to use it. One of the most undervalued N.F.L. bets is the home underdog — a team favored to lose but playing in its home stadium. If you had bet $5,000 on the home underdog in every N.F.L. game over the past two decades, you would be up about $150,000 by now (a winning rate of roughly 53 percent). So far, so good. I wonder if this pattern still holds. But then Dubner and Levitt continue: This fact has led some academics to conclude that bookmakers simply aren’t very smart. If an academic researcher can find this loophole, shouldn’t a professional bookie be able to? But the fact is most bookies are doing just fine. So could it be
3 0.086734183 991 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-04-Insecure researchers aren’t sharing their data
Introduction: Jelte Wicherts writes: I thought you might be interested in reading this paper that is to appear this week in PLoS ONE. In it we [Wicherts, Marjan Bakker, and Dylan Molenaar] show that the willingness to share data from published psychological research is associated both with “the strength of the evidence” (against H0) and the prevalence of errors in the reporting of p-values. The issue of data archiving will likely be put on the agenda of granting bodies and the APA/APS because of what Diederik Stapel did . I hate hate hate hate hate when people don’t share their data. In fact, that’s the subject of my very first column on ethics for Chance magazine. I have a story from 22 years ago, when I contacted some scientists and showed them how I could reanalyze their data more efficiently (based on a preliminary analysis of their published summary statistics). They seemed to feel threatened by the suggestion and refused to send me their raw data. (It was an animal experiment
4 0.082700282 697 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-05-A statistician rereads Bill James
Introduction: Ben Lindbergh invited me to write an article for Baseball Prospectus. I first sent him this item on the differences between baseball and politics but he said it was too political for them. I then sent him this review of a book on baseball’s greatest fielders but he said they already had someone slotted to review that book. Then I sent him some reflections on the great Bill James and he published it ! If anybody out there knows Bill James, please send this on to him: I have some questions at the end that I’m curious about. Here’s how it begins: I read my first Bill James book in 1984, took my first statistics class in 1985, and began graduate study in statistics the next year. Besides giving me the opportunity to study with the best applied statistician of the late 20th century (Don Rubin) and the best theoretical statistician of the early 21st (Xiao-Li Meng), going to graduate school at Harvard in 1986 gave me the opportunity to sit in a basement room one evening that
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Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: In a review of the movie Moneyball, David Denby writes : Lewis, Miller, and the screenwriters may have gone too far in their gleeful celebration of Beane and their denigration of scouts. Beane has never made it to the World Series (in 2002, the A’s were eliminated in the playoffs by the Minnesota Twins). Oakland has had a mediocre record for the past five years, and it’s finishing a lousy season this year. Success in baseball remains something of a mystery (though pots of money continue to help the Yankees and the Sox). Sabermetrics is a fascinating approach to winning, but it’s one of many approaches, not the ultimate answer. It can’t explain why some teams with the right stats catch fire and others fade. In the movie, the scouts say some dumb stuff, but they know that statistics, no matter how they’re broken down, can’t predict everything. Denby generally likes the movie and is supportive of its message, so I shouldn’t really complain, but . . . the above passage is just s
Introduction: Eric Tassone writes: Probably not blog-worthy/blog-appropriate, but have you heard Bill James discussing the Sandusky & Paterno stuff? I think you discussed once his stance on the Dowd Report, and this seems to be from the same part of his personality—which goes beyond contrarian . . . I have in fact blogged on James ( many times ) and on Paterno , so yes I think this is blogworthy. On the other hand, most readers of this blog probably don’t care about baseball, football, or William James, so I’ll put the rest below the fold. What is legendary baseball statistician Bill James doing, defending the crime-coverups of legendary coach Joe Paterno? As I wrote in my earlier blog on Paterno, it isn’t always easy to do the right thing, and I have no idea if I’d behave any better if I were in such a situation. The characteristics of a good coach do not necessarily provide what it takes to make good decisions off the field. In this sense even more of the blame should go
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Introduction: Regarding editing : The only serious editing I’ve ever received has been for my New York Times op-eds and my article in the American Scientist. My book editors have all been nice people, and they’ve helped me with many things (including suggestions of what my priorities should be in communicating with readers)–they’ve been great–but they’ve not given (nor have I expected or asked for) serious editing. Maybe I should’ve asked for it, I don’t know. I’ve had time-wasting experiences with copy editors and a particularly annoying experience with a production editor (who was so difficult that my coauthors and I actually contacted our agent and a lawyer about the possibility of getting out of our contract), but that’s another story. Regarding clutch hitting , Bill James once noted that it’s great when a Bucky Dent hits an unexpected home run, but what’s really special is being able to get the big hit when it’s expected of you. The best players can do their best every time they come t
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Introduction: Someone just stopped by and dropped off a copy of the book Wizardry: Baseball’s All-time Greatest Fielders Revealed, by Michael Humphreys. I don’t have much to say about the topic–I did see Brooks Robinson play, but I don’t remember any fancy plays. I must have seen Mark Belanger but I don’t really recall. Ozzie Smith was cool but I saw only him on TV. The most impressive thing I ever saw live was Rickey Henderson stealing a base. The best thing about that was that everyone was expecting him to steal the base, and he still was able to do it. But that wasn’t fielding either. Anyway, Humphreys was nice enough to give me a copy of his book, and since I can’t say much (I didn’t have it in me to study the formulas in detail, nor do I know enough to be able to evaluate them), I might as well say what I can say right away. (Note: Humphreys replies to some of these questions in a comment .) 1. Near the beginning, Humphreys says that 10 runs are worth about 1 win. I’ve always b
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Introduction: Faithful readers will know that my ideal alternative career is to be an editor in the Max Perkins mold. If not that, I think I’d enjoy being a literary essayist, someone like Alfred Kazin or Edmund Wilson or Louis Menand, who could write about my favorite authors and books in a forum where others would read and discuss what I wrote. I could occasionally collect my articles into books, and so on. On the other hand, if I actually had such a career, I wouldn’t have much of an option to do statistical research in my spare time, so I think for my own broader goals, I’ve gotten hold of the right side of the stick. As it is, I enjoy writing about literary matters but it never quite seems worth spending the time to do it right. (And, stepping outside myself, I realize that I have a lot more to offer the world as a statistician than literary critic. Criticism is like musicianship–it can be hard to do, and it’s impressive when done well, but a lot of people can do it. Literary criticism
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Introduction: In a review of the movie Moneyball, David Denby writes : Lewis, Miller, and the screenwriters may have gone too far in their gleeful celebration of Beane and their denigration of scouts. Beane has never made it to the World Series (in 2002, the A’s were eliminated in the playoffs by the Minnesota Twins). Oakland has had a mediocre record for the past five years, and it’s finishing a lousy season this year. Success in baseball remains something of a mystery (though pots of money continue to help the Yankees and the Sox). Sabermetrics is a fascinating approach to winning, but it’s one of many approaches, not the ultimate answer. It can’t explain why some teams with the right stats catch fire and others fade. In the movie, the scouts say some dumb stuff, but they know that statistics, no matter how they’re broken down, can’t predict everything. Denby generally likes the movie and is supportive of its message, so I shouldn’t really complain, but . . . the above passage is just s
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Introduction: It’s not just for Chaucer (or Mad Max) anymore. Peter Frase writes: It’s a shame that we neglect to re-translate older works into English merely because they were originally written in English. Languages change, and our reactions to words and formulations change. This is obvious when you read something like Chaucer, but it’s true to a more subtle degree of more recent writings. There is a pretty good chance that something written in the 19th century won’t mean the same thing to us that it meant to its contemporary readers. Thus it would make sense to re-translate Huckleberry Finn into modern language, in the same way we periodically get new translations of Homer or Dante or Thomas Mann. This is a point that applies equally well to non-fiction and social theory: in some ways, English-speaking sociologists are lucky that our canonical trio of classical theorists-Marx, Weber, and Durkheim-all wrote in another language. The most recent translation of Capital is eminently more readable
3 0.87291962 968 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-21-Could I use a statistics coach?
Introduction: In a thought-provoking article subtitled “Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?,” surgeon/journalist Atul Gawande describes how, even after eight years and more than two thousand operations, he benefited from coaching (from a retired surgeon), just as pro athletes and accomplished musicians do. He then talks about proposals to institute coaching for teachers to help them perform better. This all makes sense to me—except that I’m a little worried about expansion of the teacher coaching program. I can imagine it could work pretty well for teachers who are motivated to be coached—for example, I think I would get a lot out of it—but I’m afraid that if teacher coaching became a big business, it would get taken over by McKinsey-style scam artists. But could I use a coach? First, let me get rid of the easy questions. 1. Yes, I could use a squash coach. I enjoy squash and play when I can, but I’m terrible at it. I’m sure a coach would help. On the other hand, I’m h
4 0.86763728 1040 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-03-Absolutely last Niall Ferguson post ever, in which I offer him serious advice
Introduction: I made the mistake of reading this article by Niall Ferguson summarizing his notorious new book. Here’s the best bit: Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly. What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic. Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully
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