andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1225 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Reading this amusing book review on willpower by Will Self ( link from Jenny Davidson) reminds me that recently [actually, several months ago; recall that most of this blog is published on a delay], I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. I think that when I write this sort of thing it annoys people, because I’m lucky enough to be in a position to get a lot done—projects ranging from the ethics column to Stan—but I get frustrated when I spend a week trying to work, and then when the week’s over, I realize that all I did was respond to emails, review a bunch of journal submissions and grant proposals, and spend a lot of time staring into space while putting off whatever it was that I really thought I should be doing. I thought and thought, and I decided that my best strategy is what I call positive procrastination . Procrastination is of course typically considered a bad thing (or, as ironic-style writers would write, a Bad Thing). But you can actually use it, ju
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1 Reading this amusing book review on willpower by Will Self ( link from Jenny Davidson) reminds me that recently [actually, several months ago; recall that most of this blog is published on a delay], I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. [sent-1, score-0.521]
2 I thought and thought, and I decided that my best strategy is what I call positive procrastination . [sent-3, score-0.82]
3 Procrastination is of course typically considered a bad thing (or, as ironic-style writers would write, a Bad Thing). [sent-4, score-0.221]
4 The key is to put important items on the procrastination plate, so that whey you put off doing task A, you move to useful task B. [sent-6, score-1.209]
5 For example, if I have to prepare a class and I don’t want to do it, I’ll set my procrastination task to be revising some article. [sent-7, score-1.095]
6 The key is to set the procrastination list ahead of time. [sent-9, score-0.794]
7 For me, blogging is the last line of procrastination. [sent-11, score-0.121]
8 It’s a public service, I can use it to promote my ideas, and I can recycle some of the material later. [sent-13, score-0.08]
9 It can help to try out some ideas over and over again in different forms. [sent-14, score-0.077]
10 Anyway, I was getting really frustrated about getting nothing done, and then positive procrastination saved the day. [sent-16, score-1.368]
11 I don’t think this trick will work indefinitely; at some point I’ll have to come up with some new way to get myself to work. [sent-17, score-0.071]
12 But, in the meantime, I wanted to pass this on to you. [sent-18, score-0.067]
13 I’m sure it’s an idea that’s been written and broadcast many times before in different forms. [sent-19, score-0.091]
14 The other important part, for me, is to reflect upon the audience. [sent-20, score-0.068]
15 For whom am I ultimately writing this article or doing this computation? [sent-21, score-0.071]
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Introduction: Reading this amusing book review on willpower by Will Self ( link from Jenny Davidson) reminds me that recently [actually, several months ago; recall that most of this blog is published on a delay], I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. I think that when I write this sort of thing it annoys people, because I’m lucky enough to be in a position to get a lot done—projects ranging from the ethics column to Stan—but I get frustrated when I spend a week trying to work, and then when the week’s over, I realize that all I did was respond to emails, review a bunch of journal submissions and grant proposals, and spend a lot of time staring into space while putting off whatever it was that I really thought I should be doing. I thought and thought, and I decided that my best strategy is what I call positive procrastination . Procrastination is of course typically considered a bad thing (or, as ironic-style writers would write, a Bad Thing). But you can actually use it, ju
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Introduction: In a further discussion of the discussion about the discussion of a paper in Administrative Science Quarterly, Thomas Basbøll writes: I [Basbøll] feel “entitled”, if that’s the right word (actually, I’d say I feel privileged), to express my opinions to anyone who wants to listen, and while I think it does say something about an author whether or not they answer a question (where what it says depends very much on the quality of the question), I don’t think the author has any obligation to me to respond immediately. If I succeed in raising doubts about something in the minds of many readers, then that’s obviously something an author should take seriously. The point is that an author has a responsibility to the readership of the paper, not any one critic. I agree that the ultimate audience is the scholarly community (and, beyond that, the general public) and that the critic is just serving as a conduit, the person who poses the Q in the Q-and-A. That said, I get frustrated frust
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Introduction: I studied math and physics at MIT. To be more precise, I started in math as default–ever since I was two years old, I’ve thought of myself as a mathematician, and I always did well in math class, so it seemed like a natural fit. But I was concerned. In high school I’d been in the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad training program, and there I’d met kids who were clearly much much better at math than I was. In retrospect, I don’t think I was as bad as I’d thought at the time: there were 24 kids in the program, and I was probably around #20, if that, but I think a lot of the other kids had more practice working on “math olympiad”-type problems. Maybe I was really something like the tenth-best in the group. Tenth-best or twentieth-best, whatever it was, I reached a crisis of confidence around my sophomore or junior year in college. At MIT, I started right off taking advanced math classes, and somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t seeing the big picture. I was able to do the homework pr
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Introduction: There’s a lot of free advice out there. I offer some of it myself! As I’ve written before (see this post from 2008 reacting to this advice from Dan Goldstein for business school students, and this post from 2010 reacting to some general advice from Nassim Taleb), what we see is typically presented as advice to individuals, but it’s also interesting to consider the possible total effects if the advice is taken. It’s time to play the game again. This time it’s advice from sociologist Fabio Rojas for Ph.D. students. I’ll copy his eight points of advice, then, for each, evaluate whether I think it is positive or negative sum: 1. Show up. Even if you feel horrible, show up. No matter what. Period. Unless someone died in your family, show up. 2. Do your job. Grade the papers. Do the lab work. Unless the work is extreme, take it in stride. 3. Be completely realistic about how you will be evaluated from day #1 – acquire a teaching record and a record of publication. Don’t h
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Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: I know next to nothing about golf. My mini-golf scores typically approach the maximum of 7 per hole, and I’ve never actually played macro-golf. I did publish a paper on golf once ( A Probability Model for Golf Putting , with Deb Nolan), but it’s not so rare for people to publish papers on topics they know nothing about. Those who can’t, research. But I certainly have the ability to post other people’s ideas. Charles Murray writes: I [Murray] am playing around with the likelihood of Tiger Woods breaking Nicklaus’s record in the Majors. I’ve already gone on record two years ago with the reason why he won’t, but now I’m looking at it from a non-psychological perspective. Given the history of the majors, what how far above the average _for other great golfers_ does Tiger have to perform? Here’s the procedure I’ve been working on: 1. For all golfers who have won at at least one major since 1934 (the year the Masters began), create 120 lines: one for each Major for each year f
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