andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-1053 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Dan Kahan sends in this horror story: A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers. “It’s pretty remarkable,” said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher? The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the athe
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1 Dan Kahan sends in this horror story: A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances. [sent-1, score-1.029]
2 Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers. [sent-2, score-0.561]
3 “It’s pretty remarkable,” said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [sent-3, score-0.074]
4 The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the atheist teacher. [sent-5, score-0.396]
5 given that there are lots of atheists out there and not many rapists, I think it’s pretty clear that the bad guy described in the vignette was indeed more likely to be an atheist than a rapist. [sent-9, score-0.745]
6 What’s really disturbing about the study is that many people thought it was “more probable” that the dude is a rapist than that he is a Christian! [sent-10, score-0.771]
7 If some dude scratched my car, I wouldn’t be so quick to jump to the conclusion that he’s a rapist. [sent-12, score-0.219]
8 As Kahan says, it’s hard to say who is more confused—the study subjects or the researcher. [sent-13, score-0.285]
9 I conclude from the published results that the participants in this study do not have a sound understanding of probability. [sent-14, score-0.451]
10 There’s gotta be a way to study this in a more reasonable way. [sent-15, score-0.285]
11 My intuition is that it would be better to study representativeness directly rather than through this bank-shot analysis of a statistical fallacy. [sent-18, score-0.446]
12 The author of the news article is Kimberly Winston from the “Religion News Service” which sounds like it might be some kind of joke, but it appeared in the Washington Post. [sent-21, score-0.081]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 1053 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-11-This one is so dumb it makes me want to barf
Introduction: Dan Kahan sends in this horror story: A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers. “It’s pretty remarkable,” said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher? The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the athe
2 0.12945178 35 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-16-Another update on the spam email study
Introduction: I think youall are probably getting sick of this by now so I’ll put it all below the fold. Akinola Modupe and Katherine Milkman responded to my email about their study : We want to clarify the reason we believe that the use of deception and a lack of informed consent were appropriate and ethical for this research study. In this project, we were studying how the timing of a decision affects discrimination based on race and/or gender. The emails all participants in our study received were identical except for a) the sender’s name (we used 20 names that pretesting revealed were strongly associated with being either Caucasian, Black, Indian, Chinese or Hispanic, as well as associated with being male or female) and b) whether the meeting requested was for today or for a week from today. Recipients were randomly selected and were randomly assigned to one of the race/gender/timing conditions. This study design will allow us to test for baseline levels of discrimination in acade
3 0.12123974 1644 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-30-Fixed effects, followed by Bayes shrinkage?
Introduction: Stuart Buck writes: I have a question about fixed effects vs. random effects . Amongst economists who study teacher value-added, it has become common to see people saying that they estimated teacher fixed effects (via least squares dummy variables, so that there is a parameter for each teacher), but that they then applied empirical Bayes shrinkage so that the teacher effects are brought closer to the mean. (See this paper by Jacob and Lefgren, for example.) Can that really be what they are doing? Why wouldn’t they just run random (modeled) effects in the first place? I feel like there’s something I’m missing. My reply: I don’t know the full story here, but I’m thinking there are two goals, first to get an unbiased estimate of an overall treatment effect (and there the econometricians prefer so-called fixed effects; I disagree with them on this but I know where they’re coming from) and second to estimate individual teacher effects (and there it makes sense to use so-called
4 0.11670571 18 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-06-$63,000 worth of abusive research . . . or just a really stupid waste of time?
Introduction: As someone who relies strongly on survey research, it’s good for me to be reminded that some surveys are useful, some are useless, but one thing they almost all have in common is . . . they waste the respondents’ time. I thought of this after receiving the following email, which I shall reproduce here. My own comments appear after. Recently, you received an email from a student asking for 10 minutes of your time to discuss your Ph.D. program (the body of the email appears below). We are emailing you today to debrief you on the actual purpose of that email, as it was part of a research study. We sincerely hope our study did not cause you any disruption and we apologize if you were at all inconvenienced. Our hope is that this letter will provide a sufficient explanation of the purpose and design of our study to alleviate any concerns you may have about your involvement. We want to thank you for your time and for reading further if you are interested in understanding why you rece
5 0.11563106 2301 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-22-Ticket to Baaaaarf
Introduction: A link from the comments here took me to the wonderfully named Barfblog and a report by Don Schaffner on some reporting. First, the background: A university in England issued a press release saying that “Food picked up just a few seconds after being dropped is less likely to contain bacteria than if it is left for longer periods of time . . . The findings suggest there may be some scientific basis to the ‘5 second rule’ – the urban myth about it being fine to eat food that has only had contact with the floor for five seconds or less. Although people have long followed the 5 second rule, until now it was unclear whether it actually helped.” According to the press release, the study was “undertaken by final year Biology students” and led by a professor of microbiology. The press release hit the big time, hitting NPR, Slate, Forbes, the Daily News, etc etc. Some typical headlines: “5-second rule backed up by science” — Atlanta Journal Constitution “Eating food off the floo
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19 0.083438277 226 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-23-More on those L.A. Times estimates of teacher effectiveness
20 0.083208613 1027 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-25-Note to student journalists: Google is your friend
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same-blog 1 0.97885972 1053 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-11-This one is so dumb it makes me want to barf
Introduction: Dan Kahan sends in this horror story: A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers. “It’s pretty remarkable,” said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher? The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the athe
2 0.75866193 2301 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-22-Ticket to Baaaaarf
Introduction: A link from the comments here took me to the wonderfully named Barfblog and a report by Don Schaffner on some reporting. First, the background: A university in England issued a press release saying that “Food picked up just a few seconds after being dropped is less likely to contain bacteria than if it is left for longer periods of time . . . The findings suggest there may be some scientific basis to the ‘5 second rule’ – the urban myth about it being fine to eat food that has only had contact with the floor for five seconds or less. Although people have long followed the 5 second rule, until now it was unclear whether it actually helped.” According to the press release, the study was “undertaken by final year Biology students” and led by a professor of microbiology. The press release hit the big time, hitting NPR, Slate, Forbes, the Daily News, etc etc. Some typical headlines: “5-second rule backed up by science” — Atlanta Journal Constitution “Eating food off the floo
3 0.75431317 161 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-24-Differences in color perception by sex, also the Bechdel test for women in movies
Introduction: Here’s a pretty funny example of silly statistics, caught by Lisa Wade : A study published in 2001 . . . asked undergraduate college students their favorite color and presented the results by sex. Men’s favorites are on the left, women’s on the right: The authors of the study, Lee Ellis and Christopher Ficek, wrote: We are inclined to suspect the involvement of neurohormonal factors. Studies of rats have found average sex differences in the number of neurons comprising various parts of the visual cortex. Also, gender differences have been found in rat preferences for the amount of sweetness in drinking water. One experiment demonstrated that the sex differences in rat preferences for sweetness was eliminated by depriving males of male-typical testosterone levels in utero. Perhaps, prenatal exposure to testosterone and other sex hormones operates in a similar way to “bias” preferences for certain colors in humans. As Wade points out, that all seems a bit ridiculous giv
4 0.75408041 1741 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-27-Thin scientists say it’s unhealthy to be fat
Introduction: “Even as you get near the upper reaches of the normal weight range, you begin to see increases in chronic diseases,” said JoAnn Manson, chief of the Division of Preventive Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, HMS Michael and Lee Bell Professor of Women’s Health, and HSPH professor of epidemiology. “It’s a clear gradient of increase.” Yeah, she would say that. Thin people. And then there’s Frank Hu, professor of nutrition at Harvard: The studies that Flegal [the author of the original study finding a negative correlation between body mass index and mortality] did use included many samples of people who were chronically ill, current smokers and elderly, according to Hu. These factors are associated with weight loss and increased mortality. In other words, people are not dying because they are slim, he said. They are slim because they are dying—of cancer or old age, for example. By doing a meta-analysis of studies that did not properly control for this bias, Flegal amplif
5 0.75261921 1184 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-25-Facebook Profiles as Predictors of Job Performance? Maybe…but not yet.
Introduction: Eric Loken explains : Some newspapers and radio stations recently picked up a story that Facebook profiles can be revealing, and can yield information more predictive of job performance than typical self-report personality questionnaires or even an IQ test. . . . A most consistent finding from the last 50 years of organizational psychology research is that cognitive ability is the strongest predictor of job performance, sometimes followed closely by measures of conscientiousness (and recently there has been interest in perseverance or grit). So has the Facebook study upended all this established research? Not at all, and the reason lies in the enormous gap between the claims about the study’s outcomes, and the details of what was actually done. The researchers had two college population samples. In Study 1 they had job performance ratings for the part-time college jobs of about 10% of the original sample. But in study 1 they did not have any IQ or cognitive ability measure.
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same-blog 1 0.93240786 1053 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-11-This one is so dumb it makes me want to barf
Introduction: Dan Kahan sends in this horror story: A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers. “It’s pretty remarkable,” said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher? The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the athe
2 0.91515946 1548 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-25-Health disparities are associated with low life expectancy
Introduction: Lee Seachrest points to an article , “Life expectancy and disparity: an international comparison of life table data,” by James Vaupel, Zhen Zhang, and Alyson van Raalte. This paper has killer graphs. Here are their results: In 89 of the 170 years from 1840 to 2009, the country with the highest male life expectancy also had the lowest male life disparity. This was true in 86 years for female life expectancy and disparity. In all years, the top several life expectancy leaders were also the top life disparity leaders. Although only 38% of deaths were premature, fully 84% of the increase in life expectancy resulted from averting premature deaths. The reduction in life disparity resulted from reductions in early-life disparity, that is, disparity caused by premature deaths; late-life disparity levels remained roughly constant. The authors also note: Reducing early-life disparities helps people plan their less-uncertain lifetimes. A higher likelihood of surviving to old age
3 0.91381967 567 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-10-English-to-English translation
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
4 0.91096085 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
Introduction: Ole Rogeberg writes: After reading your recent post , I thought you might find this interesting – especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It’s an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading – with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later – he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike. No idea what’s h
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