andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1140 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: John Cook writes that he’d like to hear more people talk about “educational monoculture.” I don’t actually know John Cook but I enjoy reading his blog, so I feel like the least I can do is to honor his request. I have to admit that I have a bit of a monocultural temperament myself. I have strong feelings about the right and wrong way to do things, and I don’t have much patience for what seems to me to be the wrong way. As a result, I’ve often disparaged or ignored important statistical developments because some small aspect of the new idea didn’t fit with my thinking. (On the plus side, I think I’ve disparaged or ignored lots more bad ideas thad deserve oblivion.) I’ve always been suspicious of the hedgehog/fox distinction because my impression is that just about everybody likes to think of him or herself as a fox. Being a hedgehog is like being “ideological”; most of us like to think of ourselves as pragmatic foxes. And in any case I think most statisticians are foxes.
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1 ” I don’t actually know John Cook but I enjoy reading his blog, so I feel like the least I can do is to honor his request. [sent-2, score-0.261]
2 I have to admit that I have a bit of a monocultural temperament myself. [sent-3, score-0.442]
3 I have strong feelings about the right and wrong way to do things, and I don’t have much patience for what seems to me to be the wrong way. [sent-4, score-0.375]
4 As a result, I’ve often disparaged or ignored important statistical developments because some small aspect of the new idea didn’t fit with my thinking. [sent-5, score-0.622]
5 (On the plus side, I think I’ve disparaged or ignored lots more bad ideas thad deserve oblivion. [sent-6, score-0.85]
6 ) I’ve always been suspicious of the hedgehog/fox distinction because my impression is that just about everybody likes to think of him or herself as a fox. [sent-7, score-0.355]
7 Being a hedgehog is like being “ideological”; most of us like to think of ourselves as pragmatic foxes. [sent-8, score-0.189]
8 And in any case I think most statisticians are foxes. [sent-9, score-0.077]
9 One of the many positive outcomes of my mugging at Berkeley was a commitment to pluralism (for example, see here ). [sent-10, score-0.383]
10 Finally, my approach as a political scientist and public opinion researcher is to understand the views of others. [sent-12, score-0.342]
11 “Moving beyond monoculture” doesn’t mean that I abandon my skepticism but it means that I should at least try to understand other approaches to looking at the world. [sent-14, score-0.473]
12 I thought the above discussion would be more useful than yet another argument about the extent to which modern education is such a scam etc. [sent-17, score-0.124]
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same-blog 1 0.99999976 1140 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-27-Educational monoculture
Introduction: John Cook writes that he’d like to hear more people talk about “educational monoculture.” I don’t actually know John Cook but I enjoy reading his blog, so I feel like the least I can do is to honor his request. I have to admit that I have a bit of a monocultural temperament myself. I have strong feelings about the right and wrong way to do things, and I don’t have much patience for what seems to me to be the wrong way. As a result, I’ve often disparaged or ignored important statistical developments because some small aspect of the new idea didn’t fit with my thinking. (On the plus side, I think I’ve disparaged or ignored lots more bad ideas thad deserve oblivion.) I’ve always been suspicious of the hedgehog/fox distinction because my impression is that just about everybody likes to think of him or herself as a fox. Being a hedgehog is like being “ideological”; most of us like to think of ourselves as pragmatic foxes. And in any case I think most statisticians are foxes.
2 0.15605126 638 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-30-More on the correlation between statistical and political ideology
Introduction: This is a chance for me to combine two of my interests–politics and statistics–and probably to irritate both halves of the readership of this blog. Anyway… I recently wrote about the apparent correlation between Bayes/non-Bayes statistical ideology and liberal/conservative political ideology: The Bayes/non-Bayes fissure had a bit of a political dimension–with anti-Bayesians being the old-line conservatives (for example, Ronald Fisher) and Bayesians having a more of a left-wing flavor (for example, Dennis Lindley). Lots of counterexamples at an individual level, but my impression is that on average the old curmudgeonly, get-off-my-lawn types were (with some notable exceptions) more likely to be anti-Bayesian. This was somewhat based on my experiences at Berkeley. Actually, some of the cranky anti-Bayesians were probably Democrats as well, but when they were being anti-Bayesian they seemed pretty conservative. Recently I received an interesting item from Gerald Cliff, a pro
3 0.14196326 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
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
4 0.12073404 738 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Works well versus well understood
Introduction: John Cook discusses the John Tukey quote, “The test of a good procedure is how well it works, not how well it is understood.” Cook writes: At some level, it’s hard to argue against this. Statistical procedures operate on empirical data, so it makes sense that the procedures themselves be evaluated empirically. But I [Cook] question whether we really know that a statistical procedure works well if it isn’t well understood. Specifically, I’m skeptical of complex statistical methods whose only credentials are a handful of simulations. “We don’t have any theoretical results, buy hey, it works well in practice. Just look at the simulations.” Every method works well on the scenarios its author publishes, almost by definition. If the method didn’t handle a scenario well, the author would publish a different scenario. I agree with Cook but would give a slightly different emphasis. I’d say that a lot of methods can work when they are done well. See the second meta-principle liste
5 0.11369862 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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same-blog 1 0.96764225 1140 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-27-Educational monoculture
Introduction: John Cook writes that he’d like to hear more people talk about “educational monoculture.” I don’t actually know John Cook but I enjoy reading his blog, so I feel like the least I can do is to honor his request. I have to admit that I have a bit of a monocultural temperament myself. I have strong feelings about the right and wrong way to do things, and I don’t have much patience for what seems to me to be the wrong way. As a result, I’ve often disparaged or ignored important statistical developments because some small aspect of the new idea didn’t fit with my thinking. (On the plus side, I think I’ve disparaged or ignored lots more bad ideas thad deserve oblivion.) I’ve always been suspicious of the hedgehog/fox distinction because my impression is that just about everybody likes to think of him or herself as a fox. Being a hedgehog is like being “ideological”; most of us like to think of ourselves as pragmatic foxes. And in any case I think most statisticians are foxes.
2 0.8372348 604 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-08-More on the missing conservative psychology researchers
Introduction: Will Wilkinson adds to the discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s remarks regarding the overwhelming prevalance of liberal or left-wing attitudes among psychology professors. I pretty much agree with Wilkinson’s overview: Folks who constantly agree with one another grow insular, self-congratulatory, and not a little lazy. The very possibility of disagreement starts to seem weird or crazy. When you’re trying to do science about human beings, this attitude’s not so great. Wilkinson also reviewed the work of John Jost in this area. Jost is a psychology researcher with the expected liberal/left political leanings, but his relevance here is that he has actually done research on political attitudes and personality types. In Wilkinson’s words: Jost has done plenty of great work that helps explain not only why the best minds in science are liberal, but why most scientists-most academics, even-are liberal. Individuals with the personality trait that most strongly predicts an inclinati
Introduction: Q. D. Leavis wrote: The answer does seem to be that the academic world, like other worlds, is run by the politicians, and sensitively scrupulous people tend to leave politics to other people, while people with genuine work to do certainly have no time as well as no taste for committee-rigging and the associated techniques. And then of course there are the forces of native stupidity reinforced by that blind hostility to criticism, reform, new ideas and superior ability which is human as well as academic nature. Not that I’ve ever read anything by Mrs. Leavis (or, as the Brits used to write, Mrs Leavis). The above quote is one of the epigraphs to a book by Richard Kostelanetz. Whom I’ve never heard of, except in a footnote in John Rodden’s classic Orwell study, The Politics of Literary Reputation. I’ll have more to say about Orwell in another post, but for now let me return to the above Leavis quote, to which I have three reactions: 1. On a personal level, I’m on Leavis’s s
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to an interesting article by Terry Teachout on David Mamet’s political conservatism. I don’t think of playwrights as gurus, but I do find it interesting to consider the political orientations of authors and celebrities . I have only one problem with Teachout’s thought-provoking article. He writes: As early as 2002 . . . Arguing that “the Western press [had] embraced antisemitism as the new black,” Mamet drew a sharp contrast between that trendy distaste for Jews and the harsh realities of daily life in Israel . . . In 2006, Mamet published a collection of essays called The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Jewish Self-Hatred and the Jews that made the point even more bluntly. “The Jewish State,” he wrote, “has offered the Arab world peace since 1948; it has received war, and slaughter, and the rhetoric of annihilation.” He went on to argue that secularized Jews who “reject their birthright of ‘connection to the Divine’” succumb in time to a self-hatred tha
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Introduction: Mark Lilla recalls some recent Barack Obama quotes and then writes : If this is the way the president and his party think about human psychology, it’s little wonder they’ve taken such a beating. In the spirit of that old line, “That and $4.95 will get you a tall latte,” let me agree with Lilla and attribute the Democrats’ losses in 2010 to the following three factors: 1. A poor understanding of human psychology; 2. The Democrats holding unified control of the presidency and congress with a large majority in both houses (factors that are historically associated with big midterm losses); and 3. A terrible economy. I will let you, the readers, make your best guesses as to the relative importance of factors 1, 2, and 3 above. Don’t get me wrong: I think psychology is important, as is the history of ideas (the main subject of Lilla’s article), and I’d hope that Obama (and also his colleagues in both parties in congress) can become better acquainted with psychology, moti
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Introduction: As a matter of convention, we usually run 3 or 4 chains in JAGS. By default, this gives rise to chains that draw samples from 3 or 4 distinct pseudorandom number generators. I didn’t go and check whether it does things 111,222,333 or 123,123,123, but in any event the “parallel chains” in JAGS are samples drawn from distinct RNGs computed on a single processor core. But we all have multiple cores now, or we’re computing on a cluster or the cloud! So the behavior we’d like from rjags is to use the foreach package with each JAGS chain using a parallel-safe RNG. The default behavior with n.chain=1 will be that each parallel instance will use .RNG.name[1] , the Wichmann-Hill RNG. JAGS 2.2.0 includes a new lecuyer module (along with the glm module, which everyone should probably always use, and doesn’t have many undocumented tricks that I know of). But lecuyer is completely undocumented! I tried .RNG.name="lecuyer::Lecuyer" , .RNG.name="lecuyer::lecuyer" , and .RNG.name=
2 0.95464563 707 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-12-Human nature can’t be changed (except when it can)
Introduction: I was checking the Dilbert blog (sorry! I was just curious what was up after the events of a few weeks ago) and saw this: I [Scott Adams] wonder if any old-time racists still exist. I knew a few racists when I was a kid, back in upstate New York. In my adult life, I don’t think I’ve met one. . . . I certainly understand if you’ve witnessed it, or suffered from it. I’m just saying I haven’t seen it where I live. Clearly that sort of activity is distributed unevenly around the country. Just to be clear: I’m only saying I haven’t personally witnessed overt racism in my adult life. I accept that you have seen it firsthand, if you say so. Classic racism of the old-timey variety is probably only possible in people who don’t own television sets and haven’t gone through grade school. I’ll grant you that racist prison gangs and neo-Nazis exist. But obviously something else is going on with those guys. Let’s call them the exceptions. . . . I assume discrimination must be going on somep
3 0.95382595 1793 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-08-The Supreme Court meets the fallacy of the one-sided bet
Introduction: Doug Hartmann writes ( link from Jay Livingston): Justice Antonin Scalia’s comment in the Supreme Court hearings on the U.S. law defining marriage that “there’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not.” Hartman argues that Scalia is factually incorrect—there is not actually “considerable disagreement among sociologists” on this issue—and quotes a recent report from the American Sociological Association to this effect. Assuming there’s no other considerable group of sociologists (Hartman knows of only one small group) arguing otherwise, it seems that Hartman has a point. Scalia would’ve been better off omitting the phrase “among sociologists”—then he’d have been on safe ground, because you can always find somebody to take a position on the issue. Jerry Falwell’s no longer around but there’s a lot more where he came from. Even among scientists, there’s
Introduction: Jeff Ratto points me to this news article by Dean Baker reporting the work of three economists, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin, who found errors in a much-cited article by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff analyzing historical statistics of economic growth and public debt. Mike Konczal provides a clear summary; that’s where I got the above image. Errors in data processing and data analysis It turns out that Reinhart and Rogoff flubbed it. Herndon et al. write of “spreadsheet errors, omission of available data, weighting, and transcription.” The spreadsheet errors are the most embarrassing, but the other choices in data analysis seem pretty bad too. It can be tough to work with small datasets, so I have sympathy for Reinhart and Rogoff, but it does look like they were jumping to conclusions in their paper. Perhaps the urgency of the topic moved them to publish as fast as possible rather than carefully considering the impact of their data-analytic choi
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Introduction: John Cook writes that he’d like to hear more people talk about “educational monoculture.” I don’t actually know John Cook but I enjoy reading his blog, so I feel like the least I can do is to honor his request. I have to admit that I have a bit of a monocultural temperament myself. I have strong feelings about the right and wrong way to do things, and I don’t have much patience for what seems to me to be the wrong way. As a result, I’ve often disparaged or ignored important statistical developments because some small aspect of the new idea didn’t fit with my thinking. (On the plus side, I think I’ve disparaged or ignored lots more bad ideas thad deserve oblivion.) I’ve always been suspicious of the hedgehog/fox distinction because my impression is that just about everybody likes to think of him or herself as a fox. Being a hedgehog is like being “ideological”; most of us like to think of ourselves as pragmatic foxes. And in any case I think most statisticians are foxes.
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