andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1148 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
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
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 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. [sent-4, score-1.115]
2 The above quote is one of the epigraphs to a book by Richard Kostelanetz. [sent-7, score-0.089]
3 Whom I’ve never heard of, except in a footnote in John Rodden’s classic Orwell study, The Politics of Literary Reputation. [sent-8, score-0.069]
4 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. [sent-9, score-0.072]
5 I’d much rather work (or blog, which I feel is related to my work and is also a public service) than spend time on academic politics: forming coalitions, doing the pre-meeting meetings, trading favors, kissing up and kicking down, and all the rest. [sent-11, score-0.362]
6 To put it another way, I don’t like political games because (a) I’m not good at manipulation and deception, and (b) Much of politics is zero-sum, and I prefer to collaborate in positive-sum activities such as writing Stan. [sent-12, score-0.7]
7 But on a more practical level, somebody needs to do the dirty work. [sent-14, score-0.091]
8 I’ve encountered some administrators who are good at “committee-rigging,” etc. [sent-16, score-0.088]
9 I’ve seem people use political processes in a pointless destructive way—power for the sake of power—but others can use their political skills to foster smooth cooperation. [sent-18, score-0.917]
10 To put it another way, I require the political efforts of others to create the safe space I need to do my work. [sent-19, score-0.483]
11 And it’s a special bonus when these political efforts are not “reinforced by that blind hostility to criticism, reform, new ideas and superior ability. [sent-20, score-0.954]
12 As a political scientist, I recognize that politics is necessary. [sent-22, score-0.482]
13 Whatever non-politicized zones we have in life are often the result of continued political effort. [sent-25, score-0.288]
14 As the saying goes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. [sent-26, score-0.186]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('leavis', 0.553), ('politics', 0.265), ('political', 0.217), ('reinforced', 0.19), ('hostility', 0.182), ('blind', 0.156), ('orwell', 0.153), ('superior', 0.153), ('reform', 0.133), ('academic', 0.121), ('efforts', 0.108), ('mrs', 0.101), ('stupidity', 0.101), ('deception', 0.095), ('rodden', 0.095), ('liberty', 0.095), ('coalitions', 0.091), ('destructive', 0.091), ('eternal', 0.091), ('dirty', 0.091), ('criticism', 0.09), ('quote', 0.089), ('kicking', 0.088), ('administrators', 0.088), ('others', 0.086), ('power', 0.083), ('sake', 0.083), ('genuine', 0.083), ('forming', 0.079), ('foster', 0.079), ('favors', 0.076), ('collaborate', 0.076), ('trading', 0.074), ('forces', 0.073), ('native', 0.073), ('pointless', 0.073), ('another', 0.072), ('bonus', 0.072), ('smooth', 0.071), ('meetings', 0.071), ('continued', 0.071), ('manipulation', 0.07), ('worlds', 0.069), ('footnote', 0.069), ('ve', 0.068), ('ideas', 0.066), ('politicians', 0.066), ('level', 0.066), ('fight', 0.065), ('literary', 0.064)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999988 1148 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-31-“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”
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
2 0.13440722 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
3 0.13138834 478 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-20-More on why “all politics is local” is an outdated slogan
Introduction: Yesterday I wrote that Mickey Kaus was right to point out that it’s time to retire Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum that “all politics are local.” As Kaus points out, all the congressional elections in recent decades have been nationalized. The slogan is particularly silly for Tip O’Neill himself. Sure, O’Neill had to have a firm grip on local politics to get his safe seat in the first place, but after that it was smooth sailing. Jonathan Bernstein disagrees , writing: Yes, but: don’t most Members of the House have ironclad partisan districts? And isn’t the most important single thing they can do to protect themselves involve having pull in state politics to avoid being gerrymandered? That is “all politics is local,” no? There’s also a fair amount they can do to stay on the good side of their local party, thus avoiding a primary fight. And, even in an era of nationalized elections, there’s still plenty a Member of Congress can do to to influence elections on the margins, a
4 0.12238706 475 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-19-All politics are local — not
Introduction: Mickey Kaus does a public service by trashing Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum that “all politics are local.” As Kaus point out, all the congressional elections in recent decades have been nationalized. I’d go one step further and say that, sure, all politics are local–if you’re Tip O’Neill and represent a ironclad Democratic seat in Congress. It’s easy to be smug about your political skills if you’re in a safe seat and have enough pull in state politics to avoid your district getting gerrymandered. Then you can sit there and sagely attribute your success to your continuing mastery of local politics rather than to whatever it took to get the seat in the first place.
5 0.10790294 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
7 0.099752098 508 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-08-More evidence of growing nationalization of congressional elections
8 0.095413007 600 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-04-“Social Psychologists Detect Liberal Bias Within”
9 0.09238904 15 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-03-Public Opinion on Health Care Reform
10 0.086428076 1884 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-05-A story of fake-data checking being used to shoot down a flawed analysis at the Farm Credit Agency
11 0.08545804 585 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-22-“How has your thinking changed over the past three years?”
13 0.082773291 1496 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-14-Sides and Vavreck on the 2012 election
14 0.082333907 1743 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-28-Different modes of discourse
15 0.080886997 654 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-09-There’s no evidence that voters choose presidential candidates based on their looks
16 0.07803838 390 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-02-Fragment of statistical autobiography
17 0.075751439 769 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-15-Mr. P by another name . . . is still great!
18 0.075162634 828 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-28-Thoughts on Groseclose book on media bias
19 0.075030252 1832 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The blogroll
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.143), (1, -0.082), (2, 0.009), (3, 0.04), (4, -0.048), (5, 0.024), (6, 0.009), (7, -0.012), (8, 0.013), (9, 0.035), (10, -0.004), (11, 0.01), (12, -0.015), (13, -0.01), (14, -0.008), (15, -0.009), (16, -0.041), (17, -0.03), (18, 0.004), (19, -0.025), (20, 0.031), (21, -0.043), (22, -0.06), (23, 0.004), (24, 0.015), (25, -0.006), (26, 0.036), (27, -0.008), (28, -0.006), (29, -0.008), (30, 0.0), (31, -0.015), (32, -0.016), (33, -0.017), (34, 0.026), (35, -0.012), (36, -0.028), (37, 0.015), (38, 0.046), (39, -0.017), (40, 0.072), (41, -0.016), (42, -0.033), (43, -0.012), (44, -0.008), (45, -0.015), (46, 0.004), (47, 0.04), (48, 0.019), (49, 0.023)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.9724158 1148 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-31-“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”
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
2 0.87859839 1947 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-20-We are what we are studying
Introduction: Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins writes : When native Australians or New Guineans say that their totemic animals and plants are their kinsmen – that these species are persons like themselves, and that in offering them to others they are giving away part of their own substance – we have to take them seriously, which is to say empirically, if we want to understand the large consequences of these facts for how they organise their lives. The graveyard of ethnographic studies is strewn with the remains of reports which, thanks to anthropologists’ own presuppositions as to what constitutes empirical fact, were content to ignore or debunk the Amazonian peoples who said that the animals they hunted were their brothers-in-law, the Africans who described the way they systematically killed their kings when they became weak, or the Fijian chiefs who claimed they were gods. My first thought was . . . wait a minute! Whazzat with “presuppositions as to what constitutes empirical fact”? That a
3 0.85116994 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: Steven Hayward at the American Enterprise Institute wrote an article , sure to attract the attention of people such as myself, entitled, “The irrelevance of modern political science,” in which he discusses some silly-sounding papers presented at the recent American Political Science Association and then moves to a larger critique of quantitative political science: I [Hayward] have often taken a random article from the American Political Science Review, which resembles a mathematical journal on most of its pages, and asked students if they can envision this method providing the mathematical formula that will deliver peace in the Middle East. Even the dullest students usually grasp the point without difficulty. At the sister blog, John Sides discusses and dismisses Hayward’s arguments, point on that, among other things, political science might very well be useful even if it doesn’t deliver peace in the Middle East. After all, the U.S. Army didn’t deliver peace in the Midd
5 0.78619927 483 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-23-Science, ideology, and human origins
Introduction: A link from Tyler Cowen led me to this long blog article by Razib Khan, discussing some recent genetic findings on human origins in the context of the past twenty-five years of research and popularization of science. I don’t know much about human origins (beyond my ooh-that’s-cool reactions to exhibits at the Natural History Museum, my general statistician’s skepticism at various over-the-top claims I’ve heard over the years about “mitochondrial Eve” and the like, and various bits I’ve read over the years regarding when people came over to Australia, America, etc.), but what particularly interested me about Khan’s article was his discussion about the various controversies among scientists, his own reactions when reading and thinking about these issues as they were happening (Khan was a student at the time), and the interaction between science and political ideology. There’s a limit to how far you can go with this sort of cultural criticism of science, and Khan realizes this
6 0.77241886 1496 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-14-Sides and Vavreck on the 2012 election
7 0.76819855 2330 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-12-Historical Arc of Universities
8 0.76096517 139 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-10-Life in New York, Then and Now
10 0.75916743 1812 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-19-Chomsky chomsky chomsky chomsky furiously
12 0.75523269 1031 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-27-Richard Stallman and John McCarthy
13 0.75408792 1140 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-27-Educational monoculture
14 0.75386792 711 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-14-Steven Rhoads’s book, “The Economist’s View of the World”
15 0.75144958 1515 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-29-Jost Haidt
16 0.75102174 113 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-28-Advocacy in the form of a “deliberative forum”
17 0.74802673 1633 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-21-Kahan on Pinker on politics
18 0.74448913 1335 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-21-Responding to a bizarre anti-social-science screed
19 0.74200743 600 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-04-“Social Psychologists Detect Liberal Bias Within”
20 0.73999435 189 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-06-Proposal for a moratorium on the use of the words “fashionable” and “trendy”
topicId topicWeight
[(6, 0.159), (9, 0.033), (12, 0.02), (16, 0.064), (24, 0.106), (32, 0.017), (43, 0.02), (44, 0.01), (55, 0.018), (63, 0.031), (84, 0.021), (86, 0.021), (90, 0.015), (99, 0.317)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.97739822 221 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-21-Busted!
Introduction: I’m just glad that universities don’t sanction professors for publishing false theorems. If the guy really is nailed by the feds for fraud, I hope they don’t throw him in prison. In general, prison time seems like a brutal, expensive, and inefficient way to punish people. I’d prefer if the government just took 95% of his salary for several years, made him do community service (cleaning equipment at the local sewage treatment plant, perhaps; a lab scientist should be good at this sort of thing, no?), etc. If restriction of this dude’s personal freedom is judged be part of the sentence, he could be given some sort of electronic tag that would send a message to the police if he were ever more than 3 miles from his home. But no need to bill the taxpayers for the cost of keeping him in prison.
Introduction: Marc Tanguay writes in with a specific question that has a very general answer. First, the question: I [Tanguay] am currently running a MCMC for which I have 3 parameters that are restricted to a specific space. 2 are bounded between 0 and 1 while the third is binary and updated by a Beta-Binomial. Since my priors are also bounded, I notice that, conditional on All the rest (which covers both data and other parameters), the density was not varying a lot within the space of the parameters. As a result, the acceptance rate is high, about 85%, and this despite the fact that all the parameter’s space is explore. Since in your book, the optimal acceptance rates prescribed are lower that 50% (in case of multiple parameters), do you think I should worry about getting 85%. Or is this normal given the restrictions on the parameters? First off: Yes, my guess is that you should be taking bigger jumps. 85% seems like too high an acceptance rate for Metropolis jumping. More generally, t
3 0.96603286 1906 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-19-“Behind a cancer-treatment firm’s rosy survival claims”
Introduction: Brett Keller points to a recent news article by Sharon Begley and Robin Respaut: A lot of doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers in the United States decline to treat people who can’t pay, or have inadequate insurance, among other reasons. What sets CTCA [Cancer Treatment Centers of America] apart is that rejecting certain patients and, even more, culling some of its patients from its survival data lets the company tout in ads and post on its website patient outcomes that look dramatically better than they would if the company treated all comers. These are the rosy survival numbers . . . Details: CTCA reports on its website that the percentage of its patients who are alive after six months, a year, 18 months and longer regularly tops national figures. For instance, 60 percent of its non-small-cell lung cancer patients are alive at six months, CTCA says, compared to 38 percent nationally. And 64 percent of its prostate cancer patients are alive at three years, vers
4 0.96483952 1710 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-06-The new Stan 1.1.1, featuring Gaussian processes!
Introduction: We just released Stan 1.1.1 and RStan 1.1.1 As usual, you can find download and install instructions at: http://mc-stan.org/ This is a patch release and is fully backward compatible with Stan and RStan 1.1.0. The main thing you should notice is that the multivariate models should be much faster and all the bugs reported for 1.1.0 have been fixed. We’ve also added a bit more functionality. The substantial changes are listed in the following release notes. v1.1.1 (5 February 2012) ====================================================================== Bug Fixes ———————————- * fixed bug in comparison operators, which swapped operator< with operator<= and swapped operator> with operator>= semantics * auto-initialize all variables to prevent segfaults * atan2 gradient propagation fixed * fixed off-by-one in NUTS treedepth bound so NUTS goes at most to specified tree depth rather than specified depth + 1 * various compiler compatibility and minor consistency issues * f
5 0.96315181 819 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-24-Don’t idealize “risk aversion”
Introduction: Richard Thaler writes (click here and search on Thaler): Both risk and risk aversion are concepts that were once well defined, but are now in danger of becoming Aetherized [this is Thaler's term for adding free parameters to a model to make it work, thus destroying the purity and much of the value of the original model]. Stocks that earn surprisingly high returns are labeled as risky, because in the theory, excess returns must be accompanied by higher risk. If, inconveniently, the traditional measures of risk such as variance or covariance with the market are not high, then the Aetherists tell us there must be some other risk; we just don’t know what it is. Similarly, traditionally the concept of risk aversion was taken to be a primitive; each person had a parameter, gamma, that measured her degree of risk aversion. Now risk aversion is allowed to be time varying, and Aetherists can say with a straight face that the market crashes of 2001 and 2008 were caused by sudden increases
6 0.95771998 150 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Gaydar update: Additional research on estimating small fractions of the population
7 0.9553979 618 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-18-Prior information . . . about the likelihood
8 0.94864202 1924 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-03-Kuhn, 1-f noise, and the fractal nature of scientific revolutions
same-blog 9 0.9424879 1148 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-31-“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”
10 0.94142944 1625 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-15-“I coach the jumpers here at Boise State . . .”
11 0.92843276 2332 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-12-“The results (not shown) . . .”
12 0.92813718 851 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-12-year + (1|year)
13 0.92732644 1489 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-09-Commercial Bayesian inference software is popping up all over
15 0.91715562 2328 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-10-What property is important in a risk prediction model? Discrimination or calibration?
16 0.91587591 563 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-07-Evaluating predictions of political events
17 0.91240114 1638 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-25-Diving chess
18 0.91141552 2165 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-09-San Fernando Valley cityscapes: An example of the benefits of fractal devastation?
19 0.90768188 506 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-06-That silly ESP paper and some silliness in a rebuttal as well
20 0.90624934 2293 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-16-Looking for Bayesian expertise in India, for the purpose of analysis of sarcoma trials