andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1370 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Daniel Mendelsohn recently asked , “Why do we love the Titanic?”, seeking to understand how it has happened that: It may not be true that ‘the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,’ as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. . . . The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. . . . If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, yo
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1 The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. [sent-6, score-0.211]
2 If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. [sent-11, score-0.179]
3 To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, you have to turn away from the facts and consider the realm to which the Titanic and its story properly belong: myth. [sent-12, score-0.138]
4 ’” - “For others, it’s a morality tale about class, or a foreshadowing of the First World War—the marker of the end of a more innocent era. [sent-14, score-0.253]
5 ” - “the most obvious thing about the Titanic’s story: it uncannily replicates the structure and the themes of our most fundamental myths and oldest tragedies. [sent-16, score-0.19]
6 Like Iphigenia, the Titanic is a beautiful ‘maiden’ sacrificed to the agendas of greedy men eager to set sail; the forty-six-thousand-ton liner is just the latest in a long line of lovely girl victims, an archetype of vulnerable femininity that stands at the core of the Western literary tradition. [sent-17, score-0.477]
7 ” - “But the Titanic embodies another strain of tragedy. [sent-18, score-0.127]
8 This is the drama of a flawed and self-destructive hero, a protagonist of great achievements and overweening presumption. [sent-19, score-0.258]
9 The tale irresistibly conflates two of the oldest archetypes in literature. [sent-21, score-0.386]
10 The Titanic is famous for real reasons (it’s a good story, it came along at the right time, etc. [sent-23, score-0.286]
11 ), but it’s also famous for being famous (and, at this point, famous for being famous for baing famous). [sent-24, score-0.908]
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Introduction: Daniel Mendelsohn recently asked , “Why do we love the Titanic?”, seeking to understand how it has happened that: It may not be true that ‘the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,’ as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. . . . The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. . . . If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, yo
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Introduction: I received the following email from someone who’d like to remain anonymous: Lately I [the anonymous correspondent] witnessed that Bruno Frey has published two articles in two well known referreed journals on the Titanic disaster that try to explain survival rates of passenger on board. The articles were published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives and Rationality & Society . While looking up the name of the second journal where I stumbled across the article I even saw that they put the message in a third journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences United States of America . To say it in Sopranos like style – with all due respect, I know Bruno Frey from conferences, I really appreciate his take on economics as a social science and he has really published more interesting stuff that most economists ever will. But putting the same message into three journals gives me headaches for at least two reasons: 1) When building a track record and scientific rep
3 0.07887847 2138 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-18-In Memoriam Dennis Lindley
Introduction: So. Farewell then Dennis Lindley. You held the Hard line on Bayesianism When others Had doubts. And you share The name of a famous Paradox. What is your subjective Prior now? We can only Infer. R. A. Thribb (17 1/2) P.S.
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Introduction: Duncan Watts gave his new book the above title, reflecting his irritation with those annoying people who, upon hearing of the latest social science research, reply with: Duh-I-knew-that. (I don’t know how to say Duh in Australian; maybe someone can translate that for me?) I, like Duncan, am easily irritated, and I looked forward to reading the book. I enjoyed it a lot, even though it has only one graph, and that graph has a problem with its y-axis. (OK, the book also has two diagrams and a graph of fake data, but that doesn’t count.) Before going on, let me say that I agree wholeheartedly with Duncan’s central point: social science research findings are often surprising, but the best results cause us to rethink our world in such a way that they seem completely obvious, in retrospect. (Don Rubin used to tell us that there’s no such thing as a “paradox”: once you fully understand a phenomenon, it should not seem paradoxical any more. When learning science, we sometimes speak
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Introduction: In my comments on academic cheating , I briefly discussed the question of how some of these papers could’ve been published in the first place, given that they tend to be of low quality. (It’s rare that people plagiarize the good stuff, and, when they do—for example when a senior scholar takes credit for a junior researcher’s contributions without giving proper credit—there’s not always a paper trail, and there can be legitimate differences of opinion about the relative contributions of the participants.) Anyway, to get back to the cases at hand: how did these rulebreakers get published in the first place? The question here is not how did they get away with cheating but how is it that top journals were publishing mediocre research? In the case of the profs who falsified data (Diederik Stapel) or did not follow scientific protocol (Mark Hauser), the answer is clear: By cheating, they were able to get the sort of too-good-to-be-true results which, if they were true, would be
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Introduction: Daniel Mendelsohn recently asked , “Why do we love the Titanic?”, seeking to understand how it has happened that: It may not be true that ‘the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,’ as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. . . . The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. . . . If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, yo
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Introduction: This is my last entry derived from Anthony Burgess’s book reviews , and it’ll be short. His review of Angus Wilson’s “The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Works” is a wonderfully balanced little thing. Nothing incredibly deep–like most items in the collection, the review is only two pages long–but I give it credit for being a rare piece of Kipling criticism I’ve seen that (a) seriously engages with the politics, without (b) congratulating itself on bravely going against the fashions of the politically incorrect chattering classes by celebrating Kipling’s magnificent achievement blah blah blah. Instead, Burgess shows respect for Kipling’s work and puts it in historical, biographical, and literary context. Burgess concludes that Wilson’s book “reminds us, in John Gross’s words, that Kipling ‘remains a haunting, unsettling presence, with whom we still have to come to terms.’ Still.” Well put, and generous of Burgess to end his review with another’s quote. Other cri
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Introduction: Commenter Rahul asked what I thought of this note by Scott Firestone ( link from Tyler Cowen) criticizing a recent discussion by Kevin Drum suggesting that lead exposure causes violent crime. Firestone writes: It turns out there was in fact a prospective study done—but its implications for Drum’s argument are mixed. The study was a cohort study done by researchers at the University of Cincinnati. Between 1979 and 1984, 376 infants were recruited. Their parents consented to have lead levels in their blood tested over time; this was matched with records over subsequent decades of the individuals’ arrest records, and specifically arrest for violent crime. Ultimately, some of these individuals were dropped from the study; by the end, 250 were selected for the results. The researchers found that for each increase of 5 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, there was a higher risk for being arrested for a violent crime, but a further look at the numbers shows a more mixe
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