andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-1083 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: After I recently criticized Gregg Easterbrook for assigning Obama an implausible 90+% chance of beating Mitt Romney, some commenters thought I was being too critical, that I should cut Easterbrook some slack because he just was speaking metaphorically. In other words, Easterbrook is a “qual.” He uses numbers in his writing because that’s what everyone is supposed to do nowadays, but he doesn’t intend those numbers to be meant literally. Similarly, he presumably didn’t really mean it when he wrote that Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren “couldn’t be more different — personally or politically.” And he had no problem typing that Obama’s approval rating was 23% because, to him, “23%” is just another word for “low.” He’s a qual, that’s all. Similarly, when Samantha Power was just being a qual when she wrote the meaningful-sounding but actually empty statement, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican pres
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1 After I recently criticized Gregg Easterbrook for assigning Obama an implausible 90+% chance of beating Mitt Romney, some commenters thought I was being too critical, that I should cut Easterbrook some slack because he just was speaking metaphorically. [sent-1, score-0.259]
2 ” He uses numbers in his writing because that’s what everyone is supposed to do nowadays, but he doesn’t intend those numbers to be meant literally. [sent-3, score-0.424]
3 Similarly, he presumably didn’t really mean it when he wrote that Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren “couldn’t be more different — personally or politically. [sent-4, score-0.075]
4 ” And he had no problem typing that Obama’s approval rating was 23% because, to him, “23%” is just another word for “low. [sent-5, score-0.081]
5 Similarly, when Samantha Power was just being a qual when she wrote the meaningful-sounding but actually empty statement, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. [sent-7, score-0.438]
6 Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm. [sent-8, score-0.153]
7 ) What really irritates me are when quals are overconfident about throwing around numbers that don’t make sense. [sent-10, score-0.706]
8 I get irritated in the same way that Bill James gets annoyed by baseball writers who disparage statistics and then turn around and celebrate some player who had flashy stats one year in a hitter’s park. [sent-12, score-0.541]
9 I get particularly annoyed when such people speak with an air of authority. [sent-13, score-0.125]
10 As noted above, I think there’s a lot of great qualitative research being done. [sent-28, score-0.205]
11 What I don’t like is the Easterbrook-like attitude that numbers can be thrown around without consequences, and what I was exploring in my post above was the impression that many people seem to have that what Easterbrook was doing was just fine. [sent-29, score-0.259]
12 If Easterbrook wants to give his subjective impressions, or if he wants to do a Thomas Friedman and interview some taxi drivers, that’s fine. [sent-30, score-0.281]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 1083 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-26-The quals and the quants
Introduction: After I recently criticized Gregg Easterbrook for assigning Obama an implausible 90+% chance of beating Mitt Romney, some commenters thought I was being too critical, that I should cut Easterbrook some slack because he just was speaking metaphorically. In other words, Easterbrook is a “qual.” He uses numbers in his writing because that’s what everyone is supposed to do nowadays, but he doesn’t intend those numbers to be meant literally. Similarly, he presumably didn’t really mean it when he wrote that Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren “couldn’t be more different — personally or politically.” And he had no problem typing that Obama’s approval rating was 23% because, to him, “23%” is just another word for “low.” He’s a qual, that’s all. Similarly, when Samantha Power was just being a qual when she wrote the meaningful-sounding but actually empty statement, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican pres
Introduction: I don’t know when I’ve seen political writing quote so misinformed as this. It’s a bizarre mixture of cliches, non-sequitors, and outright mistakes. The author is Gregg Easterbrook and he’s writing for Reuters . First, the cliches: Right now Romney seems to be the frontrunner, which, of course, is a mixed blessing. His aura of experience and reasonableness could prove quite appealing to voters. Perry continues to have the potential to light a populist fire. . . . Of all the 2012 candidates, Huntsman is the one who is Not Just Another Politician. And now the errors. At this point in the 1992 election cycle, the elder George Bush held an 89 percent approval rating. . . . Clinton beat a popular incumbent with a fantastic approval rating. For the 2012 election, Barack Obama is just as vulnerable as the elder Bush, if not even more so. Obama currently has an approval rating of 23 percent. This is all fine, except that: 1. It’s not true that at this point in the 1992 elec
3 0.34960067 1075 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-20-This guy has a regular column at Reuters
Introduction: Gregg Easterbrook : Gingrich is a wild card. He probably would end up a flaming wreckage in electoral terms, but there’s a chance he could become seen as the man unafraid to bring sweeping change to an ossified Washington, D.C. There’s perhaps a 90 percent likelihood Obama would wipe the floor with Gingrich, versus a 10 percent likelihood Gingrich would stage an historic upset. This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen since . . . ummm, I dunno, how bout this ? It actually gets worse because Easterbrook then invokes game theory. What next? Catastrophe theory? Intelligent design? P.S. Maybe I should explain for readers without an education in probability theory. Let’s suppose “wipe the floor” means that Obama gets 55%+ of the two-party vote, and let’s suppose that “an historic upset” means that Obama gets less than 50% of the vote. Now try to draw a forecast distribution that has 90% of its probability above 0.55 and 10% of it’s probability below 0.50. It’s a pretty weird-loo
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Introduction: Gregg Easterbrook may not always be on the ball, but I 100% endorse the last section of his recent column (scroll down to “Absurd Specificity Watch”). Earlier in the column, Easterbrook has a plug for Tim Tebow. I’d forgotten about Tim Tebow.
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Introduction: I don’t want to make a habit of this, but . . . I was curious what Easterbrook would write as a follow-up to his recent Huntsman puff, and here’s what he came up with: Tired of cookie-cutter political contests between hauntingly similar candidates? Then you’re going to like the upcoming race for one of the Senate seats in the late Ted Kennedy’s haunting grounds. Elizabeth Warren, best known for creating and fighting for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is hoping to challenge Republican incumbent Scott Brown. They’re both qualified, but they couldn’t be more different — personally or politically. Um, no. 1. It seems a bit of a stretch to say the two candidates “couldn’t be more different personally.” Brown is a 52-year-old married white lawyer with two children. Warren is a 62-year-old married white lawyer with three children. According to Wikipedia, they both had middle-class backgrounds, Brown in Massachusetts and Warren in Oklahoma, and they suffered some per
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same-blog 1 0.94582862 1083 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-26-The quals and the quants
Introduction: After I recently criticized Gregg Easterbrook for assigning Obama an implausible 90+% chance of beating Mitt Romney, some commenters thought I was being too critical, that I should cut Easterbrook some slack because he just was speaking metaphorically. In other words, Easterbrook is a “qual.” He uses numbers in his writing because that’s what everyone is supposed to do nowadays, but he doesn’t intend those numbers to be meant literally. Similarly, he presumably didn’t really mean it when he wrote that Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren “couldn’t be more different — personally or politically.” And he had no problem typing that Obama’s approval rating was 23% because, to him, “23%” is just another word for “low.” He’s a qual, that’s all. Similarly, when Samantha Power was just being a qual when she wrote the meaningful-sounding but actually empty statement, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican pres
Introduction: I don’t know when I’ve seen political writing quote so misinformed as this. It’s a bizarre mixture of cliches, non-sequitors, and outright mistakes. The author is Gregg Easterbrook and he’s writing for Reuters . First, the cliches: Right now Romney seems to be the frontrunner, which, of course, is a mixed blessing. His aura of experience and reasonableness could prove quite appealing to voters. Perry continues to have the potential to light a populist fire. . . . Of all the 2012 candidates, Huntsman is the one who is Not Just Another Politician. And now the errors. At this point in the 1992 election cycle, the elder George Bush held an 89 percent approval rating. . . . Clinton beat a popular incumbent with a fantastic approval rating. For the 2012 election, Barack Obama is just as vulnerable as the elder Bush, if not even more so. Obama currently has an approval rating of 23 percent. This is all fine, except that: 1. It’s not true that at this point in the 1992 elec
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Introduction: Gregg Easterbrook : Gingrich is a wild card. He probably would end up a flaming wreckage in electoral terms, but there’s a chance he could become seen as the man unafraid to bring sweeping change to an ossified Washington, D.C. There’s perhaps a 90 percent likelihood Obama would wipe the floor with Gingrich, versus a 10 percent likelihood Gingrich would stage an historic upset. This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen since . . . ummm, I dunno, how bout this ? It actually gets worse because Easterbrook then invokes game theory. What next? Catastrophe theory? Intelligent design? P.S. Maybe I should explain for readers without an education in probability theory. Let’s suppose “wipe the floor” means that Obama gets 55%+ of the two-party vote, and let’s suppose that “an historic upset” means that Obama gets less than 50% of the vote. Now try to draw a forecast distribution that has 90% of its probability above 0.55 and 10% of it’s probability below 0.50. It’s a pretty weird-loo
4 0.78401059 1574 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-12-How to Lie With Statistics example number 12,498,122
Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. Bill Kristol notes that “Four presidents in the last century have won more than 51 percent of the vote twice: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Reagan and Obama”. I’m not sure why Kristol, a conservative, is promoting the idea that Obama has a mandate, but that’s up to him. I’m more interested in the remarkable bit of cherry-picking that led to this “only four presidents” statistic. There was one way in which Obama’s victory was large: he won the electoral college 332-206. That’s a thrashing. But if you want to claim that Obama has a “popular mandate” — which people seem to interpret as an overwhelming preference of The People such that the opposition is morally obligated to give way — you can’t make that argument based on the electoral college, you have to look at the popular vote. That presents you with a challenge for the 2012 election, since Obama’s 2.7-point margin in the popular vote was the 12th-smallest out of the 57 elections we’ve had. There’s a nice sor
5 0.77648669 966 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-20-A qualified but incomplete thanks to Gregg Easterbrook’s editor at Reuters
Introduction: Dear Reuters editor: Thanks for reading my blog and correcting the erroneous numbers in Easterbrook’s column from the other day. I’m pretty sure you got the corrections from my blog because in your corrections you used the exact same links that I posted. I think your readers will like that you gave links to the sources of your numbers. But I’d appreciate if you cite me! It’s considered polite to credit your sources rather than just copying over numbers and links with no mention of where they came from. Unlike Easterbrook, I’m not expecting to be paid for this material but I’d still like to be thanked. (See the last paragraph of this post by Felix Salmon for more on the desirability of linking to your sources.) Also, since you’re correcting the article anyway, maybe you could go back and change this sentence too: But don’t sell Huntsman short because he is low in the polls – Obama had been at that point, too. As I noted earlier, As of 14 Oct 2011, Gallup gi
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Introduction: After I recently criticized Gregg Easterbrook for assigning Obama an implausible 90+% chance of beating Mitt Romney, some commenters thought I was being too critical, that I should cut Easterbrook some slack because he just was speaking metaphorically. In other words, Easterbrook is a “qual.” He uses numbers in his writing because that’s what everyone is supposed to do nowadays, but he doesn’t intend those numbers to be meant literally. Similarly, he presumably didn’t really mean it when he wrote that Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren “couldn’t be more different — personally or politically.” And he had no problem typing that Obama’s approval rating was 23% because, to him, “23%” is just another word for “low.” He’s a qual, that’s all. Similarly, when Samantha Power was just being a qual when she wrote the meaningful-sounding but actually empty statement, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican pres
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Introduction: Mark Palko writes : Chess derives most of its complexity through differentiated pieces; with checkers the complexity comes from the interaction between pieces. The result is a series of elegant graph problems where the viable paths change with each move of your opponent. To draw an analogy with chess, imagine if moving your knight could allow your opponent’s bishop to move like a rook. Add to that the potential for traps and manipulation that come with forced capture and you have one of the most remarkable games of all time. . . . It’s not unusual to hear masters of both chess and checkers (draughts) to admit that they prefer the latter. So why does chess get all the respect? Why do you never see a criminal mastermind or a Bond villain playing in a checkers tournament? Part of the problem is that we learn the game as children so we tend to think of it as a children’s game. We focus on how simple the rules are and miss how much complexity and subtlety you can get out of those ru
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