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1186 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-27-Confusion from illusory precision


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Introduction: When I posted this link to Dean Foster’s rants, some commenters pointed out this linked claim by famed statistician/provacateur Bjorn Lomberg: If [writes Lomborg] you reduce your child’s intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0.03 grams a day (that’s the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off. Let’s unpack Lomborg’s claim. I don’t know anything about the science of pesticides and cancer, but can he really be so sure that the effects are so small as to be comparable to the health effects of eating “just one apple every 20 years”? I can’t believe you could estimate effects to anything like that precision. I can’t believe anyone has such a precise estimate of the health effects of pesticides, and also I can’t believe anyone has such a precise effect of the health effect of eating an app


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

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1 When I posted this link to Dean Foster’s rants, some commenters pointed out this linked claim by famed statistician/provacateur Bjorn Lomberg: If [writes Lomborg] you reduce your child’s intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0. [sent-1, score-0.667]

2 03 grams a day (that’s the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. [sent-2, score-0.921]

3 Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off. [sent-3, score-0.6]

4 I don’t know anything about the science of pesticides and cancer, but can he really be so sure that the effects are so small as to be comparable to the health effects of eating “just one apple every 20 years”? [sent-5, score-1.412]

5 I can’t believe you could estimate effects to anything like that precision. [sent-6, score-0.448]

6 I can’t believe anyone has such a precise estimate of the health effects of pesticides, and also I can’t believe anyone has such a precise effect of the health effect of eating an apple. [sent-7, score-1.68]

7 In any case, I doubt Lomborg is entirely serious in his column; he also writes that cutting CO2 emissions would save “less than one-tenth of a polar bear” yearly, which again seems to imply an implausible (to me) precision. [sent-13, score-0.652]


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Introduction: I was reading this news article by famed business reporter James Stewart: Measured by market capitalization, Apple is the world’s biggest public company. . . . Sales for the quarter that ended Dec. 31 . . . totaled $46.33 billion, up 73 percent from the year before. Earnings more than doubled. . . . Here is the rub: Apple is so big, it’s running up against the law of large numbers. Huh? At this point I sat up, curious. Stewart continued: Also known as the golden theorem, with a proof attributed to the 17th-century Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, the law states that a variable will revert to a mean over a large sample of results. In the case of the largest companies, it suggests that high earnings growth and a rapid rise in share price will slow as those companies grow ever larger. If Apple’s share price grew even 20 percent a year for the next decade, which is far below its current blistering pace, its $500 billion market capitalization would be more than $3 tri

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Introduction: When I posted this link to Dean Foster’s rants, some commenters pointed out this linked claim by famed statistician/provacateur Bjorn Lomberg: If [writes Lomborg] you reduce your child’s intake of fruits and vegetables by just 0.03 grams a day (that’s the equivalent of half a grain of rice) when you opt for more expensive organic produce, the total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and your child is worse off. Let’s unpack Lomborg’s claim. I don’t know anything about the science of pesticides and cancer, but can he really be so sure that the effects are so small as to be comparable to the health effects of eating “just one apple every 20 years”? I can’t believe you could estimate effects to anything like that precision. I can’t believe anyone has such a precise estimate of the health effects of pesticides, and also I can’t believe anyone has such a precise effect of the health effect of eating an app

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