andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1123 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Robin Hanson writes , “people tend to like cities more than firms . . . people tend to dislike bigger firms more than small ones, cities tend to be bigger than firms, and the biggest cities tend to be the most celebrated.” Hansen goes on to consider explanations (involving “the joy of sometimes dominating,” etc.) but ends up describing himself as confused. One reason he might be confused is that, at least in the data I’ve seen, people don’t dislike big corporations—at least not when the corporation is named. Consider some survey data from 2007: OK, sure, now that there’s a recession on, Citibank probably doesn’t have 78% approval anymore. Still, these companies are pretty damn popular. You might think lots of Americans think Starbucks is stuck-up? Nope. 79% approval. Pfizer? 77%. I have no idea why Target is so much more popular than Walmart, but in any case all these numbers (with the exception of oil-spillin’ Exxon and war-profitin’ Halliburton) are stratosp
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1 Robin Hanson writes , “people tend to like cities more than firms . [sent-1, score-0.816]
2 people tend to dislike bigger firms more than small ones, cities tend to be bigger than firms, and the biggest cities tend to be the most celebrated. [sent-4, score-2.118]
3 ” Hansen goes on to consider explanations (involving “the joy of sometimes dominating,” etc. [sent-5, score-0.247]
4 One reason he might be confused is that, at least in the data I’ve seen, people don’t dislike big corporations—at least not when the corporation is named. [sent-7, score-0.552]
5 Consider some survey data from 2007: OK, sure, now that there’s a recession on, Citibank probably doesn’t have 78% approval anymore. [sent-8, score-0.261]
6 I have no idea why Target is so much more popular than Walmart, but in any case all these numbers (with the exception of oil-spillin’ Exxon and war-profitin’ Halliburton) are stratospheric. [sent-15, score-0.249]
7 I don’t know if there are approval ratings of cities, but I doubt that NY, Chicago, LA, etc. [sent-16, score-0.306]
8 Of course, liking or disliking a city is much different than liking or disliking a corporation. [sent-21, score-1.049]
9 But based on the polls, corporations appear to be quite popular, so I don’t think Hansen needs to be so confused as to why they’re not! [sent-23, score-0.399]
10 I don’t knock Hansen for not realizing this; before I’d seen the poll data shown above, I would never have guessed that that Citibank, Microsoft, Starbucks, etc. [sent-26, score-0.512]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 1123 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-17-Big corporations are more popular than you might realize
Introduction: Robin Hanson writes , “people tend to like cities more than firms . . . people tend to dislike bigger firms more than small ones, cities tend to be bigger than firms, and the biggest cities tend to be the most celebrated.” Hansen goes on to consider explanations (involving “the joy of sometimes dominating,” etc.) but ends up describing himself as confused. One reason he might be confused is that, at least in the data I’ve seen, people don’t dislike big corporations—at least not when the corporation is named. Consider some survey data from 2007: OK, sure, now that there’s a recession on, Citibank probably doesn’t have 78% approval anymore. Still, these companies are pretty damn popular. You might think lots of Americans think Starbucks is stuck-up? Nope. 79% approval. Pfizer? 77%. I have no idea why Target is so much more popular than Walmart, but in any case all these numbers (with the exception of oil-spillin’ Exxon and war-profitin’ Halliburton) are stratosp
2 0.10978453 1782 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-30-“Statistical Modeling: A Fresh Approach”
Introduction: Ben Hansen recommended to me this book and course by Daniel Kaplan. It looks pretty good. I’ve only looked at the website, not the book itself, and I’m sure I’d find lots of places to disagree with it on details, but the general flow seemed reasonable, also I liked that there’s lots of course materials to go with it. Does anyone have any experience with this book? Is it the way to go (for now)?
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Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
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Introduction: I think Lawrence Summers would like this paper by James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy (link from Krugman via Palko ). Hansen et al. write: The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. An important change is the emergence of a category of summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology. This hot extreme, which covered much less than 1% of Earth’s surface in the period of climatology, now typically covers about 10% of the land area. The point is that it makes sense to look at the whole distribution, but extreme events provide information also. P.S. Here are some papers by my Columbia colleague Wolfram Schenkler on potential impacts of global warming on agriculture.
5 0.087110102 666 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-18-American Beliefs about Economic Opportunity and Income Inequality
Introduction: Leslie McCall spoke in the sociology department here the other day to discuss changes in attitudes about income inequality as well as changes in attitudes about attitudes about income inequality. (That is, she talked about what survey respondents say, and she talked about what scholars have said about what survey respondents say.) On the plus side, the talk was interesting. On the downside, I had to leave right at the start of the discussion so I didn’t have a chance to ask my questions. So I’m placing them below. I can’t find a copy of McCall’s slides so I’ll link to this recent op-ed she wrote on the topic of “Rising Wealth Inequality: Should We Care?” Her title was “Americans Aren’t Naive,” and she wrote: Understanding what Americans think about rising income inequality has been hampered by three problems. First, polls rarely ask specifically about income inequality. They ask instead about government redistributive polices, such as taxes and welfare, which are not alw
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same-blog 1 0.93686008 1123 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-17-Big corporations are more popular than you might realize
Introduction: Robin Hanson writes , “people tend to like cities more than firms . . . people tend to dislike bigger firms more than small ones, cities tend to be bigger than firms, and the biggest cities tend to be the most celebrated.” Hansen goes on to consider explanations (involving “the joy of sometimes dominating,” etc.) but ends up describing himself as confused. One reason he might be confused is that, at least in the data I’ve seen, people don’t dislike big corporations—at least not when the corporation is named. Consider some survey data from 2007: OK, sure, now that there’s a recession on, Citibank probably doesn’t have 78% approval anymore. Still, these companies are pretty damn popular. You might think lots of Americans think Starbucks is stuck-up? Nope. 79% approval. Pfizer? 77%. I have no idea why Target is so much more popular than Walmart, but in any case all these numbers (with the exception of oil-spillin’ Exxon and war-profitin’ Halliburton) are stratosp
2 0.75721258 582 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-20-Statisticians vs. everybody else
Introduction: Statisticians are literalists. When someone says that the U.K. boundary commission’s delay in redistricting gave the Tories an advantage equivalent to 10 percent of the vote, we’re the kind of person who looks it up and claims that the effect is less than 0.7 percent. When someone says, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm,” we’re like, Hey, really? And we go look that one up too. And when someone says that engineers have more sons and nurses have more daughters . . . well, let’s not go there. So, when I was pointed to this blog by Michael O’Hare making the following claim, in the context of K-12 education in the United States: My [O'Hare's] favorite examples of this junk [educational content with no workplace value] are spelling and pencil-and-paper algorithm arithmetic. These are absolutely critical for a clerk
3 0.75421941 131 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-07-A note to John
Introduction: Jeff the Productivity Sapper points me to this insulting open letter to Nate Silver written by pollster John Zogby. I’ll go through bits of Zogby’s note line by line. (Conflict of interest warning: I have collaborated with Nate and I blog on his site). Zogby writes: Here is some advice from someone [Zogby] who has been where you [Silver] are today. Sorry, John. (I can call you that, right? Since you’re calling Nate “Nate”?). Yes, you were once the hot pollster. But, no, you were never where Nate is today. Don’t kid yourself. Zogby writes: You [Nate] are hot right now – using an aggregate of other people’s work, you got 49 of 50 states right in 2008. Yes, Nate used other people’s work. That’s what’s called “making use of available data.” Or, to use a more technical term employed in statistics, it’s called “not being an idiot.” Only in the wacky world of polling are you supposed to draw inferences about the U.S.A. using only a single survey organization. I do
4 0.74716032 1124 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-17-How to map geographically-detailed survey responses?
Introduction: David Sparks writes: I am experimenting with the mapping/visualization of survey response data, with a particular focus on using transparency to convey uncertainty. See some examples here . Do you think the examples are successful at communicating both local values of the variable of interest, as well as the lack of information in certain places? Also, do you have any general advice for choosing an approach to spatially smoothing the data in a way that preserves local features, but prevents individual respondents from standing out? I have experimented a lot with smoothing in these maps, and the cost of preventing the Midwest and West from looking “spotty” is the oversmoothing of the Northeast. My quick impression is that the graphs are more pretty than they are informative. But “pretty” is not such a bad thing! The conveying-information part is more difficult: to me, the graphs seem to be displaying a somewhat confusing mix of opinion level and population density. Consider
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Introduction: June Carbone points out sometimes people want laws to express a sentiment. This isn’t just about Congress passing National Smoked Meats Week or San Francisco establishing itself as a nuclear-free zone, it also includes things such as laws against gay marriage, where, as Carbone writes, “we ‘care too much,’ when in fact we can do so little.” I don’t have anything to add here, and I expect many of you are familiar with this idea, but it’s new to me. I’d always been puzzled by people who want to use the law to express a sentiment, but perhaps it makes sense to be open-minded and to consider this as one of the purposes of the legislative process.
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1 0.86947054 1210 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-12-Plagiarists are in the habit of lying
Introduction: Amy Hundley writes in the New Yorker about a notorious recent case of unacknowledged literary quilting : I [Hundley] was the editor at Grove/Atlantic to whom Quentin Rowan’s novel “Appearance and the Park” was submitted (“The Plagiarist’s Tale,” by Lizzie Widdicombe, February 13th & 20th). Widdicombe writes that the editor in question thought that “its plot was too close to that of another of the house’s books, ‘My Idea of Fun,’ by Will Self,” and I can only assume that this explanation came from Rowan. In fact, Rowan had lifted a passage nearly verbatim from Will Self’s novella “The Sweet Smell of Psychosis.” It was an especially delicious one, in which Self describes the media denizens of a particular bar. I recognized it immediately and informed his agent that he’d plagiarized it. Writing a plot similar to a successful novelist’s—something that can arise innocently—is very different from plagiarizing. Appropriating and remixing someone else’s work while acknowledging sources is
2 0.86910021 1569 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-08-30-30-40 Nation
Introduction: Barack Obama’s win has a potentially huge effect on policy. The current budget negotiations will affect the level and direction of government spending and on the mix of taxes paid by different groups of Americans. We can guess that a President Romney would have fought hard against upper-income tax increases. Other areas of long-term impact include the government’s stance on global warming, foreign policy, and the likelihood that Obama will nominate new Supreme Court justices who will uphold the right to abortion announced in Roe v. Wade. When it comes to public opinion, the story is different. The Democrats may well benefit in 2014 and 2016 from the anticipated slow but steady recovery of the economy over the next few years—but, as of November 6, 2012, the parties are essentially tied, with Barack Obama receiving 51% of the two-party vote, compared to Mitt Romney’s 49%, a split comparable to Al Gore’s narrow victory in 2000, Richard Nixon’s in 1968, and John Kennedy’s in 1960.
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Introduction: Robin Hanson writes , “people tend to like cities more than firms . . . people tend to dislike bigger firms more than small ones, cities tend to be bigger than firms, and the biggest cities tend to be the most celebrated.” Hansen goes on to consider explanations (involving “the joy of sometimes dominating,” etc.) but ends up describing himself as confused. One reason he might be confused is that, at least in the data I’ve seen, people don’t dislike big corporations—at least not when the corporation is named. Consider some survey data from 2007: OK, sure, now that there’s a recession on, Citibank probably doesn’t have 78% approval anymore. Still, these companies are pretty damn popular. You might think lots of Americans think Starbucks is stuck-up? Nope. 79% approval. Pfizer? 77%. I have no idea why Target is so much more popular than Walmart, but in any case all these numbers (with the exception of oil-spillin’ Exxon and war-profitin’ Halliburton) are stratosp
4 0.85552287 1397 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Stand Your Ground laws and homicides
Introduction: Jeff points me to a paper by Chandler McClellan and Erdal Tekin which begins as follows: The controversies surrounding Stand Your Ground laws have recently captured the nation’s attention. Since 2005, eighteen states have passed laws extending the right to self-defense with no duty to retreat to any place a person has a legal right to be, and several additional states are debating the adoption of similar legislation. Despite the implications that these laws may have for public safety, there has been little empirical investigation of their impact on crime and victimization. In this paper, we use monthly data from the U.S. Vital Statistics to examine how Stand Your Ground laws affect homicides. We identify the impact of these laws by exploiting variation in the effective date of these laws across states. Our results indicate that Stand Your Ground laws are associated with a significant increase in the number of homicides among whites, especially white males. According to our estimat
5 0.8413198 1281 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-25-Dyson’s baffling love of crackpots
Introduction: Peter Woit reports on the sympathy that well-known physicist Freeman Dyson has with crackpot theorists. The interesting part is that Dyson has positive feelings for these cranks, even while believing that their theories are completely wrong : In my [Dyson's] career as a scientist, I twice had the good fortune to be a personal friend of a famous dissident. One dissident, Sir Arthur Eddington, was an insider like Thomson and Tait. The other, Immanuel Velikovsky, was an outsider like Carter. Both of them were tragic figures, intellectually brilliant and morally courageous, with the same fatal flaw as Carter. Both of them were possessed by fantasies that people with ordinary common sense could recognize as nonsense. I made it clear to both that I did not believe their fantasies, but I admired them as human beings and as imaginative artists. I admired them most of all for their stubborn refusal to remain silent. With the whole world against them, they remained true to their beliefs.
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