andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1108 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: In a discussion of Paul Krugman and his critics, Noah Smith compares two styles of argumentation: Way #1 is to put your complete thought process on a page – to lay out both sides of an argument, and explain why you arrived at a conclusion. This is what [Tyler] Cowen calls the “Humean” method, after David Hume. As I [Smith] see it, the Humean method is what you use if you want to get the most out of a discussion with a well-informed but fundamentally disinterested interlocutor. . . . But not all interlocutors are disinterested. Some have political agendas. Some have strong personal biases. And not all interlocutors are well-informed. . . . In this situation, it may provide the most social benefit to adopt a more Hegelian method of argumentation. . . . two people argue their cases as strongly as possible, and observers can pick and choose the best points of each. This is how our court system works, for example. In the context of econ blogs, using a Hegelian approach means saying “
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 In a discussion of Paul Krugman and his critics, Noah Smith compares two styles of argumentation: Way #1 is to put your complete thought process on a page – to lay out both sides of an argument, and explain why you arrived at a conclusion. [sent-1, score-0.331]
2 As I [Smith] see it, the Humean method is what you use if you want to get the most out of a discussion with a well-informed but fundamentally disinterested interlocutor. [sent-3, score-0.305]
3 In this situation, it may provide the most social benefit to adopt a more Hegelian method of argumentation. [sent-14, score-0.224]
4 two people argue their cases as strongly as possible, and observers can pick and choose the best points of each. [sent-18, score-0.095]
5 In the context of econ blogs, using a Hegelian approach means saying “My opponents are going to do everything they can to push their point of view, so I had better do the same in order to balance them out. [sent-20, score-0.23]
6 ” Smith argues that Krugman’s influence on opinion and policy has come about partly because of his [Krugman's] use of the polemical, adversarial style of argument. [sent-21, score-0.247]
7 First, my impression is that Krugman has always been pretty adversarial in his style. [sent-23, score-0.357]
8 Even before his politicization as a NYT columnist, he was pretty dismissive of those he disagreed with. [sent-24, score-0.397]
9 Second, the one thing I can’t stand in academic (or other) argument is when somebody makes an attack without identifying the other side. [sent-27, score-0.223]
10 In a blog, it’s appropriate to link to opposing arguments. [sent-28, score-0.077]
11 In either case, it’s good form to name the people you’re disagreeing with, even if you don’t have the time and space to fully explicate their arguments. [sent-30, score-0.193]
12 That was one thing that bothered Kaiser and me about Freakonomics : Levitt and his associates have the habit of expressing their view without exploring other possible explanations (most notoriously in the sex-ratio example). [sent-31, score-0.564]
13 It’s not necessary to be completely open-minded but you at least want to give some references to other perspectives. [sent-32, score-0.122]
14 Krugman and Cowen (the bloggers mentioned by Smith in the linked post above) can both be pretty one-sided at times, but they’re both pretty good at linking to and engaging with the people they disagree with. [sent-33, score-0.446]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('krugman', 0.404), ('smith', 0.284), ('adversarial', 0.247), ('hegelian', 0.247), ('interlocutors', 0.247), ('humean', 0.225), ('method', 0.123), ('references', 0.122), ('cowen', 0.117), ('politicization', 0.112), ('disinterested', 0.112), ('pretty', 0.11), ('explicate', 0.106), ('associates', 0.106), ('adopt', 0.101), ('argumentation', 0.101), ('dismissive', 0.095), ('observers', 0.095), ('targets', 0.092), ('opponents', 0.09), ('styles', 0.09), ('view', 0.09), ('arrived', 0.088), ('disagreeing', 0.087), ('argument', 0.084), ('columnist', 0.084), ('noah', 0.084), ('notoriously', 0.081), ('engaging', 0.081), ('disagreed', 0.08), ('lay', 0.079), ('opposing', 0.077), ('court', 0.074), ('expressing', 0.074), ('compares', 0.074), ('bloggers', 0.073), ('print', 0.073), ('exploring', 0.073), ('identifying', 0.072), ('balance', 0.072), ('linking', 0.072), ('habit', 0.071), ('fundamentally', 0.07), ('freakonomics', 0.07), ('critics', 0.069), ('possible', 0.069), ('push', 0.068), ('nyt', 0.068), ('levitt', 0.067), ('attack', 0.067)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000001 1108 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-09-Blogging, polemical and otherwise
Introduction: In a discussion of Paul Krugman and his critics, Noah Smith compares two styles of argumentation: Way #1 is to put your complete thought process on a page – to lay out both sides of an argument, and explain why you arrived at a conclusion. This is what [Tyler] Cowen calls the “Humean” method, after David Hume. As I [Smith] see it, the Humean method is what you use if you want to get the most out of a discussion with a well-informed but fundamentally disinterested interlocutor. . . . But not all interlocutors are disinterested. Some have political agendas. Some have strong personal biases. And not all interlocutors are well-informed. . . . In this situation, it may provide the most social benefit to adopt a more Hegelian method of argumentation. . . . two people argue their cases as strongly as possible, and observers can pick and choose the best points of each. This is how our court system works, for example. In the context of econ blogs, using a Hegelian approach means saying “
Introduction: That’s ok , Krugman earlier slammed Galbraith. (I wonder if Krugman is as big a fan of “tough choices” now as he was in 1996 .) Given Krugman’s politicization in recent years, I’m surprised he’s so dismissive of the political (rather than technical-economic) nature of Hayek’s influence. (I don’t know if he’s changed his views on Galbraith in recent years.) P.S. Greg Mankiw, in contrast, labels Galbraith and Hayek as “two of the great economists of the 20th century” and writes, “even though their most famous works were written many decades ago, they are still well worth reading today.”
3 0.15429081 630 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-27-What is an economic “conspiracy theory”?
Introduction: Reviewing a research article by Michael Spence and Sandile Hlatshwayo about globalization (a paper with the sobering message that “higher-paying jobs [are] likely to follow low-paying jobs in leaving US,” Tyler Cowen writes : It is also a useful corrective to the political conspiracy theories of changes in the income distribution. . . Being not-so-blissfully ignorant of macroeconomics, I can focus on the political question, namely these conspiracy theories. I’m not quite sure what Cowen is referring to here–he neglects to provide a link to the conspiracy theories–but I’m guessing he’s referring to the famous graph by Piketty and Saez showing how very high-end incomes (top 1% or 0.1%) have, since the 1970s, risen much more dramatically in the U.S. than in other countries, along with claims by Paul Krugman and others that much of this difference can be explained by political changes in the U.S. In particular, top tax rates in the U.S. have declined since the 1970s and the p
Introduction: In the interview we discussed a couple months ago, Steven Levitt said: I [Levitt] voted for Obama [in 2008] because I wanted to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Obama. And I thought that he would be the greatest president in history. This surprised me. I’d assumed Levitt was a McCain supporter! Why? Because in October, 2008, he wrote that he “loved” the claim by conservative University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan that “the current unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is not alarming.” I’d read that at the time, perhaps incorrectly, as Mulligan making an election-season pitch that the economy was doing just fine (Mulligan: “if you are not employed by the financial industry (94 percent of you are not), don’t worry”) hence implicitly an argument for a Republican vote in that year (given the usual rules of retrospective voting that the incumbent party gets punished by a poor economy). And I correspondingly (and, it seems, incorrectly) read Levitt’s endorsement of Mu
5 0.13944516 1936 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-13-Economic policy does not occur in a political vacuum
Introduction: Even if a policymaker is sure of the ideal economic policy, he or she can only implement it with the help of some of the other political players. But I’m saying something different, echoing what I wrote a couple days ago. I thought of this the other day after seeing this recent quote from Paul Krugman ( extracted by Brad DeLong) about Larry “Starbucks” Summers: Summers is . . . indistinguishable from me [Krugman] on macro-policy. And he may be a bit to the left, because he’s even more certain than I am . . . that some extra spending now will actually help us more in fiscal terms. So he published a piece in the Financial Times that was meant to be a big statement about this. But before he got to that, he spend three paragraphs about the importance of dealing with the deficit in the medium term . . . to establish that ‘I am a respectable person; I am not like that rabble-rouser, Krugman.’ . . . Maybe. But, going back to 2009, I still suspect that Summers, or some part of S
6 0.13487159 1616 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-10-John McAfee is a Heinlein hero
7 0.12029174 120 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-30-You can’t put Pandora back in the box
9 0.11416631 1695 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-28-Economists argue about Bayes
10 0.11371687 1456 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Macro, micro, and conflicts of interest
11 0.1068051 1396 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Recently in the sister blog
12 0.1067131 1100 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-05-Freakonomics: Why ask “What went wrong?”
13 0.10160623 629 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-26-Is it plausible that 1% of people pick a career based on their first name?
15 0.094981343 1705 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-04-Recently in the sister blog
16 0.08996591 743 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-03-An argument that can’t possibly make sense
17 0.084394075 1994 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-22-“The comment section is open, but I’m not going to read them”
18 0.083266258 1060 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-15-Freakonomics: What went wrong?
19 0.082285047 170 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-29-When is expertise relevant?
20 0.081936128 809 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-19-“One of the easiest ways to differentiate an economist from almost anyone else in society”
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.146), (1, -0.058), (2, -0.0), (3, 0.039), (4, -0.027), (5, -0.03), (6, 0.047), (7, 0.006), (8, 0.046), (9, 0.035), (10, -0.049), (11, -0.033), (12, -0.033), (13, 0.018), (14, -0.06), (15, -0.019), (16, -0.075), (17, 0.024), (18, -0.032), (19, 0.045), (20, -0.003), (21, 0.002), (22, 0.003), (23, 0.004), (24, 0.029), (25, -0.044), (26, 0.064), (27, 0.026), (28, 0.028), (29, -0.01), (30, 0.001), (31, 0.018), (32, 0.035), (33, -0.011), (34, -0.016), (35, 0.016), (36, -0.013), (37, 0.044), (38, -0.002), (39, 0.004), (40, 0.018), (41, -0.021), (42, -0.014), (43, -0.022), (44, 0.009), (45, 0.021), (46, 0.041), (47, -0.027), (48, 0.021), (49, 0.03)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.94070029 1108 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-09-Blogging, polemical and otherwise
Introduction: In a discussion of Paul Krugman and his critics, Noah Smith compares two styles of argumentation: Way #1 is to put your complete thought process on a page – to lay out both sides of an argument, and explain why you arrived at a conclusion. This is what [Tyler] Cowen calls the “Humean” method, after David Hume. As I [Smith] see it, the Humean method is what you use if you want to get the most out of a discussion with a well-informed but fundamentally disinterested interlocutor. . . . But not all interlocutors are disinterested. Some have political agendas. Some have strong personal biases. And not all interlocutors are well-informed. . . . In this situation, it may provide the most social benefit to adopt a more Hegelian method of argumentation. . . . two people argue their cases as strongly as possible, and observers can pick and choose the best points of each. This is how our court system works, for example. In the context of econ blogs, using a Hegelian approach means saying “
2 0.8312887 1456 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Macro, micro, and conflicts of interest
Introduction: Jeff points me to this and this . There seems to be a perception that “economists, the people who will cooly explain why people will be completely corrupt if the marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost, see themselves as being completely not corrupt” (according to Atrios) and that “the economists who have decided to lend their names to the [Romney] campaign have been caught up in this culture of fraud” (according to Krugman). The bloggers above are talking about macro, and perhaps they’re right that macroeconomists see themselves as uncorruptible and above it all. As with political science, the key parts of macroeconomics are about what is good for the world (or, at least, what is good for the country), and it’s hard to do this well from a level of complete cynicism. I’m no expert on macroeconomics, but my general impression is that, Marxists aside, macroeconomists tend to assume shared goals. Micro, though, that’s completely different. These dudes are happy to admit to t
Introduction: I think I’m starting to resolve a puzzle that’s been bugging me for awhile. Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments: 1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist. 2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient. Argument 1 is associated with “why do they do that?” sorts of puzzles. Why do they charge so much for candy at the movie theater, why are airline ticket prices such a mess, why are people drug addicts, etc. The usual answer is that there’s some rational reason for what seems like silly or self-destructive behavior. Argument 2 is associated with “we can do better” claims such as why we should fire 80% of public-schools teachers or Moneyball-style stories about how some clever entrepreneur has made a zillion dollars by exploiting some inefficienc
Introduction: In the interview we discussed a couple months ago, Steven Levitt said: I [Levitt] voted for Obama [in 2008] because I wanted to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Obama. And I thought that he would be the greatest president in history. This surprised me. I’d assumed Levitt was a McCain supporter! Why? Because in October, 2008, he wrote that he “loved” the claim by conservative University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan that “the current unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is not alarming.” I’d read that at the time, perhaps incorrectly, as Mulligan making an election-season pitch that the economy was doing just fine (Mulligan: “if you are not employed by the financial industry (94 percent of you are not), don’t worry”) hence implicitly an argument for a Republican vote in that year (given the usual rules of retrospective voting that the incumbent party gets punished by a poor economy). And I correspondingly (and, it seems, incorrectly) read Levitt’s endorsement of Mu
5 0.74771976 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
8 0.72876096 170 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-29-When is expertise relevant?
9 0.72374612 1632 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-20-Who exactly are those silly academics who aren’t as smart as a Vegas bookie?
10 0.71159065 711 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-14-Steven Rhoads’s book, “The Economist’s View of the World”
11 0.70485628 339 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-13-Battle of the NYT opinion-page economists
12 0.70188808 1043 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-06-Krugman disses Hayek as “being almost entirely about politics rather than economics”
14 0.69032133 1696 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-29-The latest in economics exceptionalism
15 0.6846354 60 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-30-What Auteur Theory and Freshwater Economics have in common
16 0.68356389 482 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-23-Capitalism as a form of voluntarism
17 0.68101162 1850 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-10-The recursion of pop-econ
18 0.67555195 139 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-10-Life in New York, Then and Now
19 0.67414677 2070 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-20-The institution of tenure
20 0.66355163 1060 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-15-Freakonomics: What went wrong?
topicId topicWeight
[(12, 0.011), (15, 0.041), (16, 0.056), (21, 0.016), (24, 0.137), (45, 0.016), (57, 0.079), (63, 0.015), (72, 0.028), (84, 0.024), (86, 0.013), (92, 0.148), (95, 0.018), (99, 0.279)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
Introduction: Last year we discussed an important challenge in causal inference: The standard advice (given in many books, including ours) for causal inference is to control for relevant pre-treatment variables as much as possible. But, as Judea Pearl has pointed out, instruments (as in “instrumental variables”) are pre-treatment variables that we would not want to “control for” in a matching or regression sense. At first, this seems like a minor modification, with the new recommendation being to apply instrumental variables estimation using all pre-treatment instruments, and to control for all other pre-treatment variables. But that can’t really work as general advice. What about weak instruments or covariates that have some instrumental aspects? I asked Paul Rosenbaum for his thoughts on the matter, and he wrote the following: In section 18.2 of Design of Observational Studies (DOS), I [Rosenbaum] discuss “seemingly innocuous confounding” defined to be a covariate that predicts a su
same-blog 2 0.94919437 1108 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-09-Blogging, polemical and otherwise
Introduction: In a discussion of Paul Krugman and his critics, Noah Smith compares two styles of argumentation: Way #1 is to put your complete thought process on a page – to lay out both sides of an argument, and explain why you arrived at a conclusion. This is what [Tyler] Cowen calls the “Humean” method, after David Hume. As I [Smith] see it, the Humean method is what you use if you want to get the most out of a discussion with a well-informed but fundamentally disinterested interlocutor. . . . But not all interlocutors are disinterested. Some have political agendas. Some have strong personal biases. And not all interlocutors are well-informed. . . . In this situation, it may provide the most social benefit to adopt a more Hegelian method of argumentation. . . . two people argue their cases as strongly as possible, and observers can pick and choose the best points of each. This is how our court system works, for example. In the context of econ blogs, using a Hegelian approach means saying “
Introduction: A few months ago we discussed Ron Unz’s claim that Jews are massively overrepresented in Ivy League college admissions, not just in comparison to the general population of college-age Americans, but even in comparison to other white kids with comparable academic ability and preparation. Most of Unz’s article concerns admissions of Asian-Americans, and he also has a proposal to admit certain students at random (see my discussion in the link above). In the present post, I concentrate on the statistics about Jewish students, because this is where I have learned that his statistics are particularly suspect, with various numbers being off by factors of 2 or 4 or more. Unz’s article was discussed, largely favorably, by academic bloggers Tyler Cowen , Steve Hsu , and . . . me! Hsu writes: “Don’t miss the statistical supplement.” But a lot of our trust in those statistics seems to be misplaced. Some people have sent me some information showing serious problems with Unz’s methods
4 0.92350376 1563 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-05-Someone is wrong on the internet, part 2
Introduction: My coblogger John Sides feeds a troll. It’s a tough call. Yesterday I gave my reasoning for ignoring these provocateurs, but in this case the troll in question is writing for a major newspaper so it makes sense for John to go to the trouble of shooting him down. Even though I suspect the columnist was trolling for no better reason than . . . he had a deadline and nothing to say so he thought he’d wade into a controversy. On the plus side, as a statistician I’m happy that statistics is considered important enough that it’s worth trolling! When they start attacking like this, they must feel a bit on the defensive. . . .
5 0.91781157 2073 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-22-Ivy Jew update
Introduction: Nurit Baytch posted a document, A Critique of Ron Unz’s Article “The Myth of American Meritocracy” , that is relevant to an ongoing discussion we had on this blog. Baytch’s article begins: In “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” Ron Unz, the publisher of The American Conservative, claimed that Harvard discriminates against non-Jewish white and Asian students in favor of Jewish students. I [Baytch] shall demonstrate that Unz’s conclusion that Jews are over-admitted to Harvard was erroneous, as he relied on faulty assumptions and spurious data: Unz substantially overestimated the percentage of Jews at Harvard while grossly underestimating the percentage of Jews among high academic achievers, when, in fact, there is no discrepancy, as my analysis will show. In addition, Unz’s arguments have proven to be untenable in light of a recent survey of incoming Harvard freshmen conducted by The Harvard Crimson, which found that students who identified as Jewish reported a mean SAT score of 2289
6 0.91614521 1751 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-06-Janet Mertz’s response to “The Myth of American Meritocracy”
7 0.91222107 20 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-07-Bayesian hierarchical model for the prediction of soccer results
8 0.90284306 1730 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-20-Unz on Unz
9 0.89925098 1004 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-11-Kaiser Fung on how not to critique models
10 0.89861333 1743 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-28-Different modes of discourse
11 0.89768279 1460 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-16-“Real data can be a pain”
13 0.89370513 1008 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-13-Student project competition
14 0.89333278 861 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-19-Will Stan work well with 40×40 matrices?
15 0.89031112 1120 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-15-Fun fight over the Grover search algorithm
16 0.8888762 1101 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-05-What are the standards for reliability in experimental psychology?
17 0.88863909 35 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-16-Another update on the spam email study
18 0.88701171 1036 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-30-Stan uses Nuts!