andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1316 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: I’ve always thought it looked strange to see people referred to in print as Black or White rather than black or white. For example consider this sentence: “A black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of white guys standing around.” That looks fine, whereas “A Black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of White guys standing around”—that looks weird to me, as if the encounter was taking place in an Ethnic Studies seminar. But maybe I’m wrong on this. Jay Livingston argues that black and white are colors whereas Black and White are races (or, as I would prefer to say, ethnic categories) and illustrates with this picture of a white person and a White person: In conversation, I sometimes talk about pink people, brown people, and tan people, but that won’t work in a research paper. P.S. I suspect Carp will argue that I’m being naive: meanings of words change across contexts and over time. To which I reply: Sure, but I still have to choose h
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 I’ve always thought it looked strange to see people referred to in print as Black or White rather than black or white. [sent-1, score-0.87]
2 For example consider this sentence: “A black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of white guys standing around. [sent-2, score-2.034]
3 ” That looks fine, whereas “A Black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of White guys standing around”—that looks weird to me, as if the encounter was taking place in an Ethnic Studies seminar. [sent-3, score-1.71]
4 I suspect Carp will argue that I’m being naive: meanings of words change across contexts and over time. [sent-8, score-0.57]
5 To which I reply: Sure, but I still have to choose how to write these words! [sent-9, score-0.064]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1316 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-12-black and Black, white and White
Introduction: I’ve always thought it looked strange to see people referred to in print as Black or White rather than black or white. For example consider this sentence: “A black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of white guys standing around.” That looks fine, whereas “A Black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of White guys standing around”—that looks weird to me, as if the encounter was taking place in an Ethnic Studies seminar. But maybe I’m wrong on this. Jay Livingston argues that black and white are colors whereas Black and White are races (or, as I would prefer to say, ethnic categories) and illustrates with this picture of a white person and a White person: In conversation, I sometimes talk about pink people, brown people, and tan people, but that won’t work in a research paper. P.S. I suspect Carp will argue that I’m being naive: meanings of words change across contexts and over time. To which I reply: Sure, but I still have to choose h
Introduction: Aleks points me to this article showing some pretty maps by Eric Fisher showing where people of different ethnicity live within several metro areas within the U.S. The idea is simple but effective; in the words of Cliff Kuang: Fisher used a straight forward method borrowed from Rankin: Using U.S. Census data from 2000, he created a map where one dot equals 25 people. The dots are then color-coded based on race: White is pink; Black is blue; Hispanic is orange, and Asian is green. The results for various cities are fascinating: Just like every city is different, every city is integrated (or segregated) in different ways. New York is shown below. No, San Francisco is not “very, very white” But I worry that these maps are difficult for non-experts to read. For example, Kuang writes the following:: San Francisco proper is very, very white. This is an understandable mistake coming from someone who, I assume, has never lived in the Bay Area. But what’s amazing i
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Introduction: The fun part of this entry comes near the end. Amanda Marcotte has some nice things to say about Red State, Blue State and connects our findings with some current political conflicts. She picks up on our theme of perception and reality, that national journalists live in a different world and can have difficulty grasping national voting patterns: The book definitively answers the perplexing question of our time, which is, “Why do poor people in red states vote against their economic interests?” The answer is, quite simply, they don’t. There is no paradox. To quote Gelman: “If poor people were a state, they would be ‘bluer’ even than Massachusetts; if rich people were a state, they would be as ‘red’ as Alabama, Kansas, the Dakotas, or Texas.” Of course, I don’t think the stereotype of tea baggers have ever been that they’re poor. But I do think there’s a supposition that they’re lower or middle middle class, and not well-educated. That’s based on the illiterate signage, t
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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
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Introduction: I gave this talk the other day and afterwards, a white guy came up to me and said he thought it was no coincidence that the researcher who made the mistake was “Oriental.” He then went on for about 5 minutes explaining his theory. I couldn’t keep myself from laughing—I had to start coughing into a napkin to hide it.
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Introduction: I’ve always thought it looked strange to see people referred to in print as Black or White rather than black or white. For example consider this sentence: “A black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of white guys standing around.” That looks fine, whereas “A Black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of White guys standing around”—that looks weird to me, as if the encounter was taking place in an Ethnic Studies seminar. But maybe I’m wrong on this. Jay Livingston argues that black and white are colors whereas Black and White are races (or, as I would prefer to say, ethnic categories) and illustrates with this picture of a white person and a White person: In conversation, I sometimes talk about pink people, brown people, and tan people, but that won’t work in a research paper. P.S. I suspect Carp will argue that I’m being naive: meanings of words change across contexts and over time. To which I reply: Sure, but I still have to choose h
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Introduction: I was sent a copy of “Numbers Rule: The Vexing Mathematics of Democracy, from Plato to the Present,” by George Szpiro. It’s an interesting book that I think a lot of people will like, going over a bunch of voting paradoxes in the context of historical stories. Some of the topics (Arrow’s theorem and its recent refinements) are more interesting than others (the always nauseatingly boring (to me) of the “Alabama paradox” and various rules about which states get one extra House seat; for some reason people are always writing about this topic about which I could care less). But you can pick and choose among the chapters, so unevenness isn’t really such a problem. One thing that fascinates me about the topic of mathematics and representation is how many different ways there are to look at it. In 2002, I published a paper in Chance called Voting, Fairness, and Political Representation ( here’s a preprint version ; it later appeared, slightly revised, as a chapter in our Quantita
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Introduction: A statistician friend reports the following conversation at a dinner party: My friend: “So what do you do?” A good looking fellow: “I do modeling. What about you?” My friend: “Actually, I do modeling too…” Which reminds me . . . on Halloween I went out trick-or-treating straight from work. I decided to tell people I was dressed as a “dork.” Everyone was amused. But next year I want to do a real costume.
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Introduction: Jeff writes: How far off is bglmer and can it handle ordered logit or multinom logit? My reply: bglmer is very close. No ordered logit but I was just talking about it with Sophia today. My guess is that the easiest way to fit a hierarchical ordered logit or multinom logit will be to use stan. For right now I’d recommend using glmer/bglmer to fit the ordered logits in order (e.g., 1 vs. 2,3,4, then 2 vs. 3,4, then 3 vs. 4). Or maybe there’s already a hierarchical multinomial logit in mcmcpack or somewhere?
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Introduction: I’ve always thought it looked strange to see people referred to in print as Black or White rather than black or white. For example consider this sentence: “A black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of white guys standing around.” That looks fine, whereas “A Black guy was walking down the street and he saw a bunch of White guys standing around”—that looks weird to me, as if the encounter was taking place in an Ethnic Studies seminar. But maybe I’m wrong on this. Jay Livingston argues that black and white are colors whereas Black and White are races (or, as I would prefer to say, ethnic categories) and illustrates with this picture of a white person and a White person: In conversation, I sometimes talk about pink people, brown people, and tan people, but that won’t work in a research paper. P.S. I suspect Carp will argue that I’m being naive: meanings of words change across contexts and over time. To which I reply: Sure, but I still have to choose h
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