andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1233 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Having been annoyed for awhile at those in-your-face internet gurus such as Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Philip Greenspun, Jeff Jarvis, I was happy to come across this bit of Godin-bashing from Tom Slee. I’m sure Godin has some valuable insights, but I hate that in-your-face style, and I’m glad to see someone go to the trouble of pointing out all the nonsensical bits.
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Having been annoyed for awhile at those in-your-face internet gurus such as Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Philip Greenspun, Jeff Jarvis, I was happy to come across this bit of Godin-bashing from Tom Slee. [sent-1, score-1.022]
2 I’m sure Godin has some valuable insights, but I hate that in-your-face style, and I’m glad to see someone go to the trouble of pointing out all the nonsensical bits. [sent-2, score-1.211]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('godin', 0.493), ('greenspun', 0.246), ('jarvis', 0.246), ('shirky', 0.246), ('clay', 0.238), ('nonsensical', 0.231), ('gurus', 0.22), ('seth', 0.191), ('philip', 0.184), ('bits', 0.179), ('annoyed', 0.17), ('glad', 0.162), ('insights', 0.161), ('tom', 0.159), ('valuable', 0.155), ('pointing', 0.151), ('internet', 0.148), ('hate', 0.142), ('jeff', 0.141), ('style', 0.136), ('awhile', 0.132), ('trouble', 0.13), ('happy', 0.11), ('across', 0.097), ('come', 0.079), ('someone', 0.077), ('bit', 0.066), ('sure', 0.065), ('go', 0.062), ('see', 0.036)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000001 1233 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-27-Pushback against internet self-help gurus
Introduction: Having been annoyed for awhile at those in-your-face internet gurus such as Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Philip Greenspun, Jeff Jarvis, I was happy to come across this bit of Godin-bashing from Tom Slee. I’m sure Godin has some valuable insights, but I hate that in-your-face style, and I’m glad to see someone go to the trouble of pointing out all the nonsensical bits.
2 0.5131734 111 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-26-Tough love as a style of writing
Introduction: Helen DeWitt links to an interview with Seth Godin, who makes some commonplace but useful observations on jobs and careers. It’s fine, but whenever I read this sort of thing, I get annoyed by the super-aggressive writing style. These internet guys–Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Philip Greenspun, Jeff Jarvis, and so on–are always getting in your face, telling you how everything you thought was true was wrong. Some of the things these guys say are just silly (for example, Godin’s implication that Bob Dylan is more of a success than the Monkees because Dylan sells more tickets), other times they have interesting insights, but reading any of them for awhile just sets me on edge. I can’t take being shouted at, and I get a little tired of hearing over and over again that various people, industries, etc., are dinosaurs. Where does this aggressive style come from? My guess is that it’s coming from the vast supply of “business books” out there. These are books that are supposed to grab yo
3 0.18700512 868 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-24-Blogs vs. real journalism
Introduction: I was thinking a bit more about Jonathan Rauch’s lament about the fading of the buggy-whip industry print journalism, in which he mocks bloggers, analogizes blogging to scribbling with spray paint on the side of a building, and writes that the blogosphere is “the single worst medium for sustained, and therefore grown-up, reading and writing and argumentation ever invented.” Yup. Worse than talk radio. Worse than cave painting. Worse than smoke signals, rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, woodcuts, spray-paint graffiti, and every other medium of communication ever invented. OK, he didn’t really mean it. Rauch actually has an ironclad argument here. He’s claiming, in a blog, that blogging is crap. Therefore, if he fills his blog with unsupported exaggerations, that’s fine, as he’s demonstrating that blogging is . . . crap. Not to pile on, but, hey, why not? I was curious what Rauch has blogged on lately, so I googled Jonathan Rauch blog and ended up at this site , which most recently
4 0.16315268 2313 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-30-Seth Roberts
Introduction: I met Seth back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. He sometimes came to the statistics department seminar and we got to talking about various things; in particular we shared an interest in statistical graphics. Much of my work in this direction eventually went toward the use of graphical displays to understand fitted models. Seth went in another direction and got interested in the role of exploratory data analysis in science, the idea that we could use graphs not just to test or even understand a model but also as the source of new hypotheses. We continued to discuss these issues over the years; see here , for example. At some point when we were at Berkeley the administration was encouraging the faculty to teach freshman seminars, and I had the idea of teaching a course on left-handedness. I’d just read the book by Stanley Coren and thought it would be fun to go through it with a class, chapter by chapter. But my knowledge of psych
Introduction: Gayle Laackmann reports ( link from Felix Salmon) that Microsoft, Google, etc. don’t actually ask brain-teasers in their job interviews. The actually ask a lot of questions about programming. (I looked here and was relieved to see that the questions aren’t very hard. I could probably get a job as an entry-level programmer if I needed to.) Laackmann writes: Let’s look at the very widely circulated “15 Google Interview Questions that will make you feel stupid” list [ here's the original list , I think, from Lewis Lin] . . . these questions are fake. Fake fake fake. How can you tell that they’re fake? Because one of them is “Why are manhole covers round?” This is an infamous Microsoft interview question that has since been so very, very banned at both companies . I find it very hard to believe that a Google interviewer asked such a question. We’ll get back to the manhole question in a bit. Lacakmann reports that she never saw any IQ tests in three years of interviewi
7 0.09373834 446 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-03-Is 0.05 too strict as a p-value threshold?
8 0.093621239 1733 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-22-Krugman sets the bar too high
9 0.070204712 88 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-15-What people do vs. what they want to do
10 0.069693141 991 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-04-Insecure researchers aren’t sharing their data
11 0.057933971 716 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-17-Is the internet causing half the rapes in Norway? I wanna see the scatterplot.
12 0.054250222 1241 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-02-Fixed effects and identification
13 0.0533708 380 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-29-“Bluntly put . . .”
14 0.052490737 1202 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-08-Between and within-Krugman correlation
15 0.048807982 1495 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-13-Win $5000 in the Economist’s data visualization competition
16 0.047481306 787 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-05-Different goals, different looks: Infovis and the Chris Rock effect
17 0.044673752 57 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-29-Roth and Amsterdam
19 0.043418813 2232 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-03-What is the appropriate time scale for blogging—the day or the week?
20 0.041705891 1359 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-02-Another retraction
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.044), (1, -0.031), (2, -0.017), (3, 0.015), (4, 0.005), (5, -0.026), (6, 0.025), (7, -0.007), (8, 0.032), (9, 0.009), (10, -0.008), (11, -0.001), (12, 0.021), (13, 0.002), (14, 0.001), (15, 0.01), (16, -0.004), (17, -0.014), (18, 0.006), (19, 0.0), (20, -0.017), (21, -0.029), (22, -0.033), (23, -0.004), (24, -0.012), (25, -0.039), (26, -0.02), (27, 0.027), (28, -0.012), (29, 0.05), (30, 0.007), (31, 0.004), (32, -0.011), (33, -0.034), (34, -0.03), (35, 0.033), (36, 0.017), (37, -0.027), (38, -0.004), (39, -0.048), (40, 0.03), (41, -0.02), (42, 0.021), (43, 0.021), (44, -0.002), (45, -0.012), (46, 0.002), (47, 0.015), (48, 0.022), (49, -0.004)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.96042395 1233 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-27-Pushback against internet self-help gurus
Introduction: Having been annoyed for awhile at those in-your-face internet gurus such as Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Philip Greenspun, Jeff Jarvis, I was happy to come across this bit of Godin-bashing from Tom Slee. I’m sure Godin has some valuable insights, but I hate that in-your-face style, and I’m glad to see someone go to the trouble of pointing out all the nonsensical bits.
2 0.77399194 111 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-26-Tough love as a style of writing
Introduction: Helen DeWitt links to an interview with Seth Godin, who makes some commonplace but useful observations on jobs and careers. It’s fine, but whenever I read this sort of thing, I get annoyed by the super-aggressive writing style. These internet guys–Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Philip Greenspun, Jeff Jarvis, and so on–are always getting in your face, telling you how everything you thought was true was wrong. Some of the things these guys say are just silly (for example, Godin’s implication that Bob Dylan is more of a success than the Monkees because Dylan sells more tickets), other times they have interesting insights, but reading any of them for awhile just sets me on edge. I can’t take being shouted at, and I get a little tired of hearing over and over again that various people, industries, etc., are dinosaurs. Where does this aggressive style come from? My guess is that it’s coming from the vast supply of “business books” out there. These are books that are supposed to grab yo
3 0.61537367 1780 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-28-Racism!
Introduction: I was reading a book of Alfred Kazin’s letters—I don’t know if they’d be so interesting to someone who hadn’t already read a bunch of his stuff , but I found them pretty interesting—and came across this amazing bit, dated August 11, 1957: No, really, Al. Tell us what you really feel. This was in his private diary, so I can’t really criticize him for it. And all of us have private thoughts, sometimes publicly expressed, that are unworthy of our better self. For example, once I was crossing a street and a taxi driver came dangerously close, and I screamed at him, “Go back to your own country, you #&@#%*^&.” So I’m not claiming that I’m any better than Kazin. I just thought that quote was pretty amazing. I guess that’s how (some) people thought, back in the fifties. Also interesting that he wrote “ass-hole” in that context. The hyphen surprised me, also I don’t think people would use that word in this way anymore. Nowadays I think of an asshole as a person, not a place.
4 0.58853459 875 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-28-Better than Dennis the dentist or Laura the lawyer
Introduction: Kieran Healy points to Robin Mahfood, the CEO of the charity Food for the Poor. This really is pretty impressive: you see a lot of good first-name or last-name matches but not so many where the entire name forms a coherent and relevant phrase.
5 0.58488345 1759 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-12-How tall is Jon Lee Anderson?
Introduction: The second best thing about this story (from Tom Scocca) is that Anderson spells “Tweets” with a capital T. But the best thing is that Scocca is numerate—he compares numbers on the logarithmic scale: Reminding Lake that he only had 169 Twitter followers was the saddest gambit of all. Jon Lee Anderson has 17,866 followers. And Kim Kardashian has, as I write this, 17,489,892 followers. That is: Jon Lee Anderson is 1/1,000 as important on Twitter, by his own standard, as Kim Kardashian. He is 10 times closer to Mitch Lake than he is to Kim Kardashian. How often do we see a popular journalist who understands orders of magnitude? Good job, Tom Scocca! P.S. Based on his “little twerp” comment, I also wonder if Anderson suffers from tall person syndrome—that’s the problem that some people of above-average height have, that they think they’re more important than other people because they literally look down on them. Don’t get me wrong—I have lots of tall friends who are complete
6 0.57671171 868 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-24-Blogs vs. real journalism
7 0.56134647 2025 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-15-The it-gets-me-so-angry-I-can’t-deal-with-it threshold
8 0.56069052 204 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-12-Sloppily-written slam on moderately celebrated writers is amusing nonetheless
9 0.55455327 1733 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-22-Krugman sets the bar too high
10 0.54712534 1694 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-26-Reflections on ethicsblogging
11 0.54447615 767 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-15-Error in an attribution of an error
12 0.54405451 1281 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-25-Dyson’s baffling love of crackpots
13 0.54249984 1177 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-20-Joshua Clover update
14 0.54188251 723 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-21-Literary blurb translation guide
15 0.53902012 682 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-27-“The ultimate left-wing novel”
16 0.53556699 1457 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Retro ethnic slurs
18 0.53401124 1531 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-12-Elderpedia
19 0.53218114 741 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-02-At least he didn’t prove a false theorem
20 0.52267975 430 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-25-The von Neumann paradox
topicId topicWeight
[(16, 0.15), (24, 0.112), (42, 0.492), (47, 0.027), (53, 0.034), (99, 0.025)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.9495579 1233 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-27-Pushback against internet self-help gurus
Introduction: Having been annoyed for awhile at those in-your-face internet gurus such as Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Philip Greenspun, Jeff Jarvis, I was happy to come across this bit of Godin-bashing from Tom Slee. I’m sure Godin has some valuable insights, but I hate that in-your-face style, and I’m glad to see someone go to the trouble of pointing out all the nonsensical bits.
2 0.74727803 124 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-02-Note to the quals
Introduction: See here for latest rant.
Introduction: She was assigned to teach a class in “evidence-based medicine”! ( link from my usual news source). I wonder what was in the syllabus? If anyone has a copy, feel free to send to me and I will post it here. My favorite part of the story, though, is this: Almost all physician assistant students refused to comment to a reporter Tuesday, saying they’d been told by the department not to talk to media. Talk about obedience to authority! They’re studying in a program that offers nonexistent courses, but then they follow the department’s gag order.
Introduction: Paul Pudaite writes in response to my discussion with Bartels regarding effect sizes and measurement error models: You [Gelman] wrote: “I actually think there will be some (non-Gaussian) models for which, as y gets larger, E(x|y) can actually go back toward zero.” I [Pudaite] encountered this phenomenon some time in the ’90s. See this graph which shows the conditional expectation of X given Z, when Z = X + Y and the probability density functions of X and Y are, respectively, exp(-x^2) and 1/(y^2+1) (times appropriate constants). As the magnitude of Z increases, E[X|Z] shrinks to zero. I wasn’t sure it was worth the effort to try to publish a two paragraph paper. I suspect that this is true whenever the tail of one distribution is ‘sufficiently heavy’ with respect to the tail of the other. Hmm, I suppose there might be enough substance in a paper that attempted to characterize this outcome for, say, unimodal symmetric distributions. Maybe someone can do this? I think i
5 0.52144468 1775 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-23-In which I disagree with John Maynard Keynes
Introduction: In his review in 1938 of Historical Development of the Graphical Representation of Statistical Data , by H. Gray Funkhauser, for The Economic Journal , the great economist writes: Perhaps the most striking outcome of Mr. Funkhouser’s researches is the fact of the very slow progress which graphical methods made until quite recently. . . . In the first fifty volumes of the Statistical Journal, 1837-87, only fourteen graphs are printed altogether. It is surprising to be told that Laplace never drew a graph of the normal law of error . . . Edgeworth made no use of statistical charts as distinct from mathematical diagrams. Apart from Quetelet and Jevons, the most important influences were probably those of Galton and of Mulhall’s Dictionary, first published in 1884. Galton was indeed following his father and grandfather in this field, but his pioneer work was mainly restricted to meteorological maps, and he did not contribute to the development of the graphical representation of ec
6 0.46139842 1535 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-16-Bayesian analogue to stepwise regression?
7 0.4598799 1791 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-07-Scatterplot charades!
8 0.44596851 1104 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-07-A compelling reason to go to London, Ontario??
9 0.42328992 1689 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-23-MLB Hall of Fame Voting Trajectories
10 0.41176996 60 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-30-What Auteur Theory and Freshwater Economics have in common
11 0.40922266 1060 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-15-Freakonomics: What went wrong?
12 0.39623857 713 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-15-1-2 social scientist + 1-2 politician = ???
13 0.39563367 307 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-29-“Texting bans don’t reduce crashes; effects are slight crash increases”
14 0.39307535 590 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-25-Good introductory book for statistical computation?
15 0.39271623 111 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-26-Tough love as a style of writing
16 0.39261171 483 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-23-Science, ideology, and human origins
17 0.38065177 492 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-30-That puzzle-solving feeling
18 0.37495822 2356 andrew gelman stats-2014-06-02-On deck this week
19 0.37355533 795 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-10-Aleks says this is the future of visualization
20 0.36672536 1138 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-25-Chris Schmid on Evidence Based Medicine