andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-1067 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: 1. We Bayesian statisticians like to say there are three kinds of statisticians: a. Bayesians; b. People who are Bayesians but don’t realize it (that is, they act in coherence with some unstated probability); c. Failed Bayesians (that is, people whose inference could be improved by some attention to coherence). So, if a statistician does great work, we are inclined to claim this person for the Bayesian cause, even if he or she vehemently denies any Bayesian leanings. 2. In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell tells the story of when he went to prison for opposing World War 1: I [Russell] was much cheered on my arrival by the warden at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion, and I replied ‘agnostic.’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.” This remark kept me cheerful for about a week. 3. In an op-ed today, Ross Douthat argues that celebrated a
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1 We Bayesian statisticians like to say there are three kinds of statisticians: a. [sent-2, score-0.09]
2 People who are Bayesians but don’t realize it (that is, they act in coherence with some unstated probability); c. [sent-4, score-0.266]
3 So, if a statistician does great work, we are inclined to claim this person for the Bayesian cause, even if he or she vehemently denies any Bayesian leanings. [sent-6, score-0.166]
4 In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell tells the story of when he went to prison for opposing World War 1: I [Russell] was much cheered on my arrival by the warden at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. [sent-8, score-0.476]
5 ’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God. [sent-10, score-0.354]
6 In an op-ed today, Ross Douthat argues that celebrated atheist Christopher Hitchens actually “intuited” that there was a God: In his very brave and very public dying, though, one could see again why so many religious people felt a kinship with him. [sent-13, score-0.296]
7 When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood. [sent-14, score-0.793]
8 But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair. [sent-16, score-0.222]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1067 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-18-Christopher Hitchens was a Bayesian
Introduction: 1. We Bayesian statisticians like to say there are three kinds of statisticians: a. Bayesians; b. People who are Bayesians but don’t realize it (that is, they act in coherence with some unstated probability); c. Failed Bayesians (that is, people whose inference could be improved by some attention to coherence). So, if a statistician does great work, we are inclined to claim this person for the Bayesian cause, even if he or she vehemently denies any Bayesian leanings. 2. In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell tells the story of when he went to prison for opposing World War 1: I [Russell] was much cheered on my arrival by the warden at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion, and I replied ‘agnostic.’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.” This remark kept me cheerful for about a week. 3. In an op-ed today, Ross Douthat argues that celebrated a
2 0.11159396 1232 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-27-Banned in NYC school tests
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 .
3 0.098712243 1469 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-25-Ways of knowing
Introduction: In this discussion from last month, computer science student and Judea Pearl collaborator Elias Barenboim expressed an attitude that hierarchical Bayesian methods might be fine in practice but that they lack theory, that Bayesians can’t succeed in toy problems. I posted a P.S. there which might not have been noticed so I will put it here: I now realize that there is some disagreement about what constitutes a “guarantee.” In one of his comments, Barenboim writes, “the assurance we have that the result must hold as long as the assumptions in the model are correct should be regarded as a guarantee.” In that sense, yes, we have guarantees! It is fundamental to Bayesian inference that the result must hold if the assumptions in the model are correct. We have lots of that in Bayesian Data Analysis (particularly in the first four chapters but implicitly elsewhere as well), and this is also covered in the classic books by Lindley, Jaynes, and others. This sort of guarantee is indeed p
4 0.095229164 698 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-05-Shocking but not surprising
Introduction: Much-honored playwright Tony Kushner was set to receive one more honor–a degree from John Jay College–but it was suddenly taken away from him on an 11-1 vote of the trustees of the City University of New York. This was the first rejection of an honorary degree nomination since 1961. The news article focuses on one trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime political aide, who opposed Kushner’s honorary degree, but to me the relevant point is that the committee as a whole voted 11-1 to ding him. Kusnher said, “I’m sickened,” he added, “that this is happening in New York City. Shocked, really.” I can see why he’s shocked, but perhaps it’s not so surprising that it’s happening in NYC. Recall the famous incident from 1940 in which Bertrand Russell was invited and then uninvited to teach at City College. The problem that time was Russell’s views on free love (as they called it back then). There seems to be a long tradition of city college officials being will
5 0.093759626 456 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-07-The red-state, blue-state war is happening in the upper half of the income distribution
Introduction: As we said in Red State, Blue State, it’s not the Prius vs. the pickup truck, it’s the Prius vs. the Hummer. Here’s the graph: Or, as Ross Douthat put it in an op-ed yesterday: This means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club. Our main motivation for doing this work was to change how the news media think about America’s political divisions, and so it’s good to see our ideas getting mainstreamed and moving toward conventional wisdom. P.S. Here’s the time series of graphs showing how the pattern that we and Douthat noticed, of a battle between coastal states and middle America that is occurring among upper-income Americans, is relatively recent, having arisen in the Clinton ye
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same-blog 1 0.97737014 1067 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-18-Christopher Hitchens was a Bayesian
Introduction: 1. We Bayesian statisticians like to say there are three kinds of statisticians: a. Bayesians; b. People who are Bayesians but don’t realize it (that is, they act in coherence with some unstated probability); c. Failed Bayesians (that is, people whose inference could be improved by some attention to coherence). So, if a statistician does great work, we are inclined to claim this person for the Bayesian cause, even if he or she vehemently denies any Bayesian leanings. 2. In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell tells the story of when he went to prison for opposing World War 1: I [Russell] was much cheered on my arrival by the warden at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion, and I replied ‘agnostic.’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.” This remark kept me cheerful for about a week. 3. In an op-ed today, Ross Douthat argues that celebrated a
2 0.81589788 1781 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-29-Another Feller theory
Introduction: My paper with Christian Robert, “Not Only Defended But Also Applied”: The Perceived Absurdity of Bayesian Inference , was recently published in The American Statistician, along with discussions by Steve Fienberg, Steve Stigler, Deborah Mayo, and Wesley Johnson, and our rejoinder, The Anti-Bayesian Moment and Its Passing . These articles revolved around the question of why the great probabilist William Feller, in his classic book on probability (“Feller, Volume 1,” as it is known), was so intemperately anti-Bayesian. We located Feller’s attitude within a post-WW2 “anti-Bayesian moment” in which Bayesian inference was perceived as a threat to the dominance of non-Bayesian methods, which were mature enough to have solved problems yet new enough to still appear to have limitless promise. Howard Wainer read this. Howard is a friend who has a longstanding interest in the history of statistics and who also has known a lot of important statisticians over the years. Howard writes: O
3 0.76222461 205 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-13-Arnold Zellner
Introduction: Steve Ziliak reports: I [Ziliak] am sorry to share this sad news about Arnold Zellner (AEA Distinguished Fellow, 2002, ASA President, 1991, ISBA co-founding president, all around genius and sweet fellow), who died yesterday morning (August 11, 2010). He was a truly great statistician and to me and to many others a generous and wonderful friend, colleague, and hero. I will miss him. His cancer was spreading everywhere though you wouldn’t know it as his energy level was Arnold’s typical: abnormally high. But then he had a stroke just a few days after an unsuccessful surgery “to help with breathing” the doctor said, and the combination of events weakened him terribly. He was vibrant through June and much of July, and maintained an 8 hour work day at the office. He never lost his sense of humor nor his joy of life. He died at home in hospice care and fortunately he did not suffer long. From the official announcement from the University of Chicago: Arnold began his academi
4 0.75080729 1259 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-11-How things sound to us, versus how they sound to others
Introduction: Hykel Hosni noticed this bit from the Lindley Prize page of the Society for Bayesan Analysis: Lindley became a great missionary for the Bayesian gospel. The atmosphere of the Bayesian revival is captured in a comment by Rivett on Lindley’s move to University College London and the premier chair of statistics in Britain: “it was as though a Jehovah’s Witness had been elected Pope.” From my perspective, this was amusing (if commonplace): a group of rationalists jocularly characterizing themselves as religious fanatics. And some of this is in response to intense opposition from outsiders (see the Background section here ). That’s my view. I’m an insider, a statistician who’s heard all jokes about religious Bayesians, from Bayesian and non-Bayesian statisticians alike. But Hosni is an outsider, and here’s how he sees the above-quoted paragraph: Research, however, is not a matter of faith but a matter of arguments, which should always be evaluated with the utmost intellec
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Introduction: From 2006 : Eric Archer forwarded this document by Nick Freemantle, “The Reverend Bayes—was he really a prophet?”, in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine: Does [Bayes's] contribution merit the enthusiasms of his followers? Or is his legacy overhyped? . . . First, Bayesians appear to have an absolute right to disapprove of any conventional approach in statistics without offering a workable alternative—for example, a colleague recently stated at a meeting that ‘. . . it is OK to have multiple comparisons because Bayesians’ don’t believe in alpha spending’. . . . Second, Bayesians appear to build an army of straw men—everything it seems is different and better from a Bayesian perspective, although many of the concepts seem remarkably familiar. For example, a very well known Bayesian statistician recently surprised the audience with his discovery of the P value as a useful Bayesian statistic at a meeting in Birmingham. Third, Bayesians possess enormous enthusiasm fo
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1 0.85413337 893 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-06-Julian Symons on Frances Newman
Introduction: “She was forty years old when she died. It is possible that her art might have developed to include a wider area of human experience, just as possible that the chilling climate of the thirties might have withered it altogether. But what she actually wrote was greatly talented. She deserves a place, although obviously not a foremost one, in any literary history of the years between the wars. The last letter she wrote, or rather dictated, to the printer of the Laforgue translations shows the invariable fastidiousness of her talent, a fastidiousness which is often infuriating but just as often impressive, and is in any case rare enough to be worth remembrance: To the Printer of Six Moral Tales This book is to be spelled and its words are to be hyphenated according to the usage of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Page introduction continuously with the tales. Do not put brackets around the numbers of the pages. All the ‘todays’ and all the ‘tomorrows’ should be spelled w
same-blog 2 0.84575152 1067 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-18-Christopher Hitchens was a Bayesian
Introduction: 1. We Bayesian statisticians like to say there are three kinds of statisticians: a. Bayesians; b. People who are Bayesians but don’t realize it (that is, they act in coherence with some unstated probability); c. Failed Bayesians (that is, people whose inference could be improved by some attention to coherence). So, if a statistician does great work, we are inclined to claim this person for the Bayesian cause, even if he or she vehemently denies any Bayesian leanings. 2. In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell tells the story of when he went to prison for opposing World War 1: I [Russell] was much cheered on my arrival by the warden at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion, and I replied ‘agnostic.’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.” This remark kept me cheerful for about a week. 3. In an op-ed today, Ross Douthat argues that celebrated a
3 0.78700829 1396 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Recently in the sister blog
Introduction: If Paul Krugman is right and it’s 1931, what happens next? What’s with Niall Ferguson? Hey, this reminds me of the Democrats in the U.S. . . . Would President Romney contract the economy? Inconsistency with prior knowledge triggers children’s causal explanatory reasoning
4 0.75920731 522 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-18-Problems with Haiti elections?
Introduction: Mark Weisbrot points me to this report trashing a recent OAS report on Haiti’s elections. Weisbrot writes: The two simplest things that are wrong with the OAS analysis are: (1) By looking only at a sample of the tally sheets and not using any statistical test, they have no idea how many other tally sheets would also be thrown out by the same criteria that they used, and how that would change the result and (2) The missing/quarantined tally sheets are much greater in number than the ones that they threw out; our analysis indicates that if these votes had been counted, the result would go the other way. I have not had a chance to take a look at this myself but I’m posting it here so that experts on election irregularities can see this and give their judgments. P.S. Weisbrot updates: We [Weisbrot et al.] published our actual paper on the OAS Mission’s Report today. The press release is here and gives a very good summary of the major problems with the OAS Mission rep
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Introduction: Marty McKee at Wolfram Research appears to have a very very stupid colleague. McKee wrote to Christian Robert: Your article, “Evidence and Evolution: A review”, caught the attention of one of my colleagues, who thought that it could be developed into an interesting Demonstration to add to the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. As Christian points out, adapting his book review into a computer demonstration would be quite a feat! I wonder what McKee’s colleague could be thinking? I recommend that Wolfram fire McKee’s colleague immediately: what an idiot! P.S. I’m not actually sure that McKee was the author of this email; I’m guessing this was the case because this other very similar email was written under his name. P.P.S. To head off the inevitable comments: Yes, yes, I know this is no big deal and I shouldn’t get bent out of shape about it. But . . . Wolfram Research has contributed such great things to the world, that I hate to think of them wasting any money paying
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