andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-993 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: 1. Freakonomics characterizes drunk driving as an example of “the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen.” 2. The CDC reports , “Alcohol-impaired drivers are involved in about 1 in 3 crash deaths, resulting in nearly 11,000 deaths in 2009.” No offense to the tenured faculty at the University of Chicago, but I’m going with the CDC on this one. P.S. The Freakonomics blog deserves to be dinged another time, not just for claiming, based on implausible assumptions and making the all-else-equal fallacy that “drunk walking is 8 times more likely to result in your death than drunk driving” but for presenting this weak inference as a fact rather than as a speculation. When doing “Freakonomics,” you can be counterintuitive, or you can be sensible, but it’s hard to be both. I mean, sure, sometimes you can be. But there’s a tradeoff, and in this case, they’re choosing to push the envelope on counterintuitiveness.
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Freakonomics characterizes drunk driving as an example of “the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen. [sent-2, score-1.312]
2 The CDC reports , “Alcohol-impaired drivers are involved in about 1 in 3 crash deaths, resulting in nearly 11,000 deaths in 2009. [sent-4, score-0.838]
3 ” No offense to the tenured faculty at the University of Chicago, but I’m going with the CDC on this one. [sent-5, score-0.417]
4 When doing “Freakonomics,” you can be counterintuitive, or you can be sensible, but it’s hard to be both. [sent-9, score-0.052]
5 But there’s a tradeoff, and in this case, they’re choosing to push the envelope on counterintuitiveness. [sent-11, score-0.384]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('drunk', 0.43), ('freakonomics', 0.34), ('cdc', 0.329), ('deaths', 0.241), ('driving', 0.23), ('dinged', 0.172), ('envelope', 0.164), ('walking', 0.143), ('counterintuitive', 0.143), ('offense', 0.138), ('tenured', 0.134), ('tradeoff', 0.132), ('crash', 0.129), ('deserves', 0.127), ('drivers', 0.124), ('characterizes', 0.123), ('implausible', 0.12), ('fallacy', 0.119), ('sensible', 0.115), ('unlikely', 0.111), ('push', 0.11), ('choosing', 0.11), ('chicago', 0.109), ('tendency', 0.109), ('death', 0.108), ('resulting', 0.107), ('claiming', 0.104), ('presenting', 0.1), ('weak', 0.099), ('faculty', 0.099), ('rare', 0.096), ('worry', 0.089), ('nearly', 0.084), ('assumptions', 0.079), ('involved', 0.079), ('reports', 0.074), ('human', 0.074), ('university', 0.065), ('result', 0.064), ('sometimes', 0.059), ('fact', 0.059), ('likely', 0.058), ('times', 0.058), ('inference', 0.058), ('making', 0.055), ('hard', 0.052), ('mean', 0.052), ('problems', 0.05), ('going', 0.046), ('based', 0.045)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0 993 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-05-The sort of thing that gives technocratic reasoning a bad name
Introduction: 1. Freakonomics characterizes drunk driving as an example of “the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen.” 2. The CDC reports , “Alcohol-impaired drivers are involved in about 1 in 3 crash deaths, resulting in nearly 11,000 deaths in 2009.” No offense to the tenured faculty at the University of Chicago, but I’m going with the CDC on this one. P.S. The Freakonomics blog deserves to be dinged another time, not just for claiming, based on implausible assumptions and making the all-else-equal fallacy that “drunk walking is 8 times more likely to result in your death than drunk driving” but for presenting this weak inference as a fact rather than as a speculation. When doing “Freakonomics,” you can be counterintuitive, or you can be sensible, but it’s hard to be both. I mean, sure, sometimes you can be. But there’s a tradeoff, and in this case, they’re choosing to push the envelope on counterintuitiveness.
2 0.18614081 1692 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-25-Freakonomics Experiments
Introduction: Stephen Dubner writes : Freakonomics Experiments is a set of simple experiments about complex issues—whether to break up with your significant other, quit your job, or start a diet, just to name a few. . . . a collaboration between researchers at the University of Chicago, Freakonomics, and—we hope!—you. Steve Levitt and John List, of the University of Chicago, run the experimental and statistical side of things. Stephen Dubner, Steve Levitt, and the Freakonomics staff have given these experiments the Freakonomics twist you’re used to. Once you flip the coin, you become a member of the most important part of the collaboration, the Freakonomics Experiments team. Without your participation, we couldn’t complete any of this research. . . . You’ll choose a question that you are facing today, such as whether to quit your job or buy a house. Then you’ll provide us some background information about yourself. After that, you’ll flip the coin to find out what you should do in your situati
3 0.18389691 454 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-07-Diabetes stops at the state line?
Introduction: From Discover : Razib Khan asks: But follow the gradient from El Paso to the Illinois-Missouri border. The differences are small across state lines, but the consistent differences along the borders really don’t make. Are there state-level policies or regulations causing this? Or, are there state-level differences in measurement? This weird pattern shows up in other CDC data I’ve seen. Turns out that CDC isn’t providing data , they’re providing model . Frank Howland answered: I suspect the answer has to do with the manner in which the county estimates are produced. I went to the original data source, the CDC, and then to the relevant FAQ . There they say that the diabetes prevalence estimates come from the “CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program. The BRFSS is an ongoing, monthly, state-based telephone survey of the adult population. The survey provides state-specific informati
4 0.15482412 1100 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-05-Freakonomics: Why ask “What went wrong?”
Introduction: A friend/colleague sent me some comments on my recent article with Kaiser Fung on Freakonomics. My friend gave several reasons why he thought we were unfair to Levitt. I’ll give my reply (my friend preferred that I not quote his email, but you can get a general sense of the questions from my answers). But first let me point you to my original post, Freakonomics 2: What went wrong? , from a couple years ago, in which I raised many of the points that ultimately went into our article. And here’s my recent note. (I numbered my points, but the email I was replying to was not numbered. This is not a point-by-point rebuttal to anything but rather just a series of remarks.) 1. Both Kaiser and I are big fans of Freakonomics. It’s only because Levitt can (and has) done better, that we’re sad when he doesn’t live up to his own high standards. If we didn’t convey this sense of respect in our American Scientist article, that is our failing. 2. I think it was at best tacky and
5 0.15087928 1060 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-15-Freakonomics: What went wrong?
Introduction: Kaiser and I tell the story . Regular readers will be familiar with much of this material. We kept our article short because of space restrictions at American Scientist magazine. Now I want to do a follow-up with all the good stories that we had to cut. P.S. Let me remind everyone once again that Freakonomics (the book and the blog) has some great stuff. Kaiser and I are only picking on Levitt & co. because we know they could do so much better. P.P.S. Just to emphasize: our point that Freakonomics has mistakes is nothing new—see, for example, the articles and blogs by Felix Salmon, Ariel Rubenstein, John DiNardo, and Daniel Davies. The contribution of our new article is explore how it was that all these mistakes happened, to juxtapose the many strengths of the Freakonomics franchise (much of the work described in the first book but also a lot of what appears on their blog) with its failings. In some ways these contrasts are characteristic of social science research in
6 0.14384952 170 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-29-When is expertise relevant?
7 0.13453454 1453 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-10-Quotes from me!
9 0.094618291 1417 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-15-Some decision analysis problems are pretty easy, no?
10 0.085533731 646 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Graphical insights into the safety of cycling.
11 0.080294624 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
12 0.074559987 1693 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-25-Subsidized driving
13 0.06952025 2194 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-01-Recently in the sister blog
14 0.069245443 920 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-22-Top 10 blog obsessions
16 0.058622409 1180 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-22-I’m officially no longer a “rogue”
17 0.057225943 2084 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-01-Doing Data Science: What’s it all about?
18 0.056389857 2361 andrew gelman stats-2014-06-06-Hurricanes vs. Himmicanes
20 0.052400686 571 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-13-A departmental wiki page?
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.073), (1, -0.024), (2, 0.001), (3, -0.008), (4, -0.02), (5, -0.003), (6, 0.016), (7, 0.016), (8, 0.016), (9, 0.021), (10, -0.054), (11, -0.014), (12, 0.002), (13, -0.009), (14, -0.044), (15, 0.01), (16, -0.01), (17, 0.045), (18, 0.009), (19, 0.049), (20, -0.042), (21, -0.02), (22, 0.008), (23, -0.005), (24, 0.05), (25, -0.046), (26, 0.02), (27, -0.013), (28, 0.065), (29, -0.004), (30, 0.01), (31, -0.022), (32, -0.017), (33, 0.019), (34, -0.008), (35, -0.002), (36, -0.004), (37, -0.004), (38, -0.042), (39, 0.023), (40, -0.019), (41, -0.022), (42, -0.011), (43, -0.03), (44, 0.014), (45, -0.018), (46, 0.004), (47, 0.03), (48, 0.013), (49, 0.025)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.94932145 993 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-05-The sort of thing that gives technocratic reasoning a bad name
Introduction: 1. Freakonomics characterizes drunk driving as an example of “the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen.” 2. The CDC reports , “Alcohol-impaired drivers are involved in about 1 in 3 crash deaths, resulting in nearly 11,000 deaths in 2009.” No offense to the tenured faculty at the University of Chicago, but I’m going with the CDC on this one. P.S. The Freakonomics blog deserves to be dinged another time, not just for claiming, based on implausible assumptions and making the all-else-equal fallacy that “drunk walking is 8 times more likely to result in your death than drunk driving” but for presenting this weak inference as a fact rather than as a speculation. When doing “Freakonomics,” you can be counterintuitive, or you can be sensible, but it’s hard to be both. I mean, sure, sometimes you can be. But there’s a tradeoff, and in this case, they’re choosing to push the envelope on counterintuitiveness.
2 0.82717407 1692 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-25-Freakonomics Experiments
Introduction: Stephen Dubner writes : Freakonomics Experiments is a set of simple experiments about complex issues—whether to break up with your significant other, quit your job, or start a diet, just to name a few. . . . a collaboration between researchers at the University of Chicago, Freakonomics, and—we hope!—you. Steve Levitt and John List, of the University of Chicago, run the experimental and statistical side of things. Stephen Dubner, Steve Levitt, and the Freakonomics staff have given these experiments the Freakonomics twist you’re used to. Once you flip the coin, you become a member of the most important part of the collaboration, the Freakonomics Experiments team. Without your participation, we couldn’t complete any of this research. . . . You’ll choose a question that you are facing today, such as whether to quit your job or buy a house. Then you’ll provide us some background information about yourself. After that, you’ll flip the coin to find out what you should do in your situati
3 0.81914306 170 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-29-When is expertise relevant?
Introduction: Responding to journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s negative review of Freakonomics 2 in the New Yorker, Stephen Dubner writes , that, although they do not have any training in climate science, it’s also the case that: Neither of us [Levitt and Dubner] were Ku Klux Klan members either, or sumo wrestlers or Realtors or abortion providers or schoolteachers or even pimps. And yet somehow we managed to write about all that without any horse dung (well, not much at least) flying our way. But Levitt is a schoolteacher (at the University of Chicago)! And, of course, you don’t have to be a sumo wrestler to be (some kind of an) expert on sumo wrestling, nor do you have to teach in the K-12 system to be an expert in education, nor do you have to provide abortions to be an expert on abortion, etc. And Levitt has had quite a bit of horse dung thrown at him for the abortion research. The connection is that abortion and climate change matter to a lot of people, while sumo wrestling and pimps and
4 0.81061137 1632 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-20-Who exactly are those silly academics who aren’t as smart as a Vegas bookie?
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
5 0.7972666 1100 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-05-Freakonomics: Why ask “What went wrong?”
Introduction: A friend/colleague sent me some comments on my recent article with Kaiser Fung on Freakonomics. My friend gave several reasons why he thought we were unfair to Levitt. I’ll give my reply (my friend preferred that I not quote his email, but you can get a general sense of the questions from my answers). But first let me point you to my original post, Freakonomics 2: What went wrong? , from a couple years ago, in which I raised many of the points that ultimately went into our article. And here’s my recent note. (I numbered my points, but the email I was replying to was not numbered. This is not a point-by-point rebuttal to anything but rather just a series of remarks.) 1. Both Kaiser and I are big fans of Freakonomics. It’s only because Levitt can (and has) done better, that we’re sad when he doesn’t live up to his own high standards. If we didn’t convey this sense of respect in our American Scientist article, that is our failing. 2. I think it was at best tacky and
6 0.79043865 1060 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-15-Freakonomics: What went wrong?
10 0.70334232 1180 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-22-I’m officially no longer a “rogue”
11 0.70138323 1491 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-10-Update on Levitt paper on child car seats
12 0.66535586 1456 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Macro, micro, and conflicts of interest
13 0.66089267 943 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-04-Flip it around
14 0.62980884 1099 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-05-Approaching harmonic convergence
15 0.62477911 13 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-30-Things I learned from the Mickey Kaus for Senate campaign
16 0.61837375 622 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-21-A possible resolution of the albedo mystery!
17 0.58929229 809 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-19-“One of the easiest ways to differentiate an economist from almost anyone else in society”
18 0.54925156 1108 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-09-Blogging, polemical and otherwise
19 0.52765149 1804 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-15-How effective are football coaches?
20 0.52757943 339 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-13-Battle of the NYT opinion-page economists
topicId topicWeight
[(9, 0.425), (15, 0.034), (16, 0.109), (24, 0.072), (72, 0.036), (89, 0.021), (95, 0.016), (99, 0.159)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.93900383 993 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-05-The sort of thing that gives technocratic reasoning a bad name
Introduction: 1. Freakonomics characterizes drunk driving as an example of “the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen.” 2. The CDC reports , “Alcohol-impaired drivers are involved in about 1 in 3 crash deaths, resulting in nearly 11,000 deaths in 2009.” No offense to the tenured faculty at the University of Chicago, but I’m going with the CDC on this one. P.S. The Freakonomics blog deserves to be dinged another time, not just for claiming, based on implausible assumptions and making the all-else-equal fallacy that “drunk walking is 8 times more likely to result in your death than drunk driving” but for presenting this weak inference as a fact rather than as a speculation. When doing “Freakonomics,” you can be counterintuitive, or you can be sensible, but it’s hard to be both. I mean, sure, sometimes you can be. But there’s a tradeoff, and in this case, they’re choosing to push the envelope on counterintuitiveness.
2 0.93092668 577 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-16-Annals of really really stupid spam
Introduction: This came in the inbox today: Dear Dr. Gelman, GenWay recently found your article titled “Multiple imputation for model checking: completed-data plots with missing and latent data.” (Biometrics. 2005 Mar;61(1):74-85.) and thought you might be interested in learning about our superior quality signaling proteins. GenWay prides itself on being a leader in customer service aiming to exceed your expectations with the quality and price of our products. With more than 60,000 reagents backed by our outstanding guarantee you are sure to find the products you have been searching for. Please feel free to visit the following resource pages: * Apoptosis Pathway (product list) * Adipocytokine (product list) * Cell Cycle Pathway (product list) * Jak STAT (product list) * GnRH (product list) * MAPK (product list) * mTOR (product list) * T Cell Receptor (product list) * TGF-beta (product list) * Wnt (product list) * View All Pathways
3 0.86791301 1291 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-30-Systematic review of publication bias in studies on publication bias
Introduction: Via Yalda Afshar , a 2005 paper by Hans-Hermann Dubben and Hans-Peter Beck-Bornholdt: Publication bias is a well known phenomenon in clinical literature, in which positive results have a better chance of being published, are published earlier, and are published in journals with higher impact factors. Conclusions exclusively based on published studies, therefore, can be misleading. Selective under-reporting of research might be more widespread and more likely to have adverse consequences for patients than publication of deliberately falsified data. We investigated whether there is preferential publication of positive papers on publication bias. They conclude, “We found no evidence of publication bias in reports on publication bias.” But of course that’s the sort of finding regarding publication bias of findings on publication bias that you’d expect would get published. What we really need is a careful meta-analysis to estimate the level of publication bias in studies of publi
4 0.84127724 1664 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-10-Recently in the sister blog: Brussels sprouts, ugly graphs, and switched at birth
Introduction: 1. Congress vs. Nickelback: The real action is in the cross tabs : Conservatives are mean, liberals are big babies, and, if supporting an STD is what it takes to be a political moderate, I don’t want to be one. 2. How 2012 stacks up: The worst graph on record? : OK, not actually worse than this one . 3. Boys will be boys; cows will be cows : Children’s essentialist reasoning about gender categories and animal species.
5 0.82418603 529 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-21-“City Opens Inquiry on Grading Practices at a Top-Scoring Bronx School”
Introduction: Sharon Otterman reports : When report card grades were released in the fall for the city’s 455 high schools, the highest score went to a small school in a down-and-out section of the Bronx . . . A stunning 94 percent of its seniors graduated, more than 30 points above the citywide average. . . . “When I interviewed for the school,” said Sam Buchbinder, a history teacher, “it was made very clear: this is a school that doesn’t believe in anyone failing.” That statement was not just an exhortation to excellence. It was school policy. By order of the principal, codified in the school’s teacher handbook, all teachers should grade their classes in the same way: 30 percent of students should earn a grade in the A range, 40 percent B’s, 25 percent C’s, and no more than 5 percent D’s. As long as they show up, they should not fail. Hey, that sounds like Harvard and Columbia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H various selective northeastern colleges I’ve known. Of course, we^H^H
6 0.81718135 1356 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-31-Question 21 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
7 0.77773488 1532 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-13-A real-life dollar auction game!
8 0.76563942 1424 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-22-Extreme events as evidence for differences in distributions
9 0.76518381 1332 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-20-Problemen met het boek
10 0.70288217 1566 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-07-A question about voting systems—unrelated to U.S. elections!
11 0.68732738 1961 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-29-Postdocs in probabilistic modeling! With David Blei! And Stan!
12 0.68454266 29 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-12-Probability of successive wins in baseball
13 0.67780137 389 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-01-Why it can be rational to vote
14 0.67779958 1565 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-06-Why it can be rational to vote
15 0.66563427 1110 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-10-Jobs in statistics research! In New Jersey!
16 0.65939081 1142 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-29-Difficulties with the 1-4-power transformation
17 0.65939075 560 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-06-Education and Poverty
18 0.65223217 1226 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-22-Story time meets the all-else-equal fallacy and the fallacy of measurement
19 0.62491488 1715 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-09-Thomas Hobbes would be spinning in his grave
20 0.61022699 640 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-31-Why Edit Wikipedia?