andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1396 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: If Paul Krugman is right and it’s 1931, what happens next? What’s with Niall Ferguson? Hey, this reminds me of the Democrats in the U.S. . . . Would President Romney contract the economy? Inconsistency with prior knowledge triggers children’s causal explanatory reasoning
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same-blog 1 1.0 1396 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Recently in the sister blog
Introduction: If Paul Krugman is right and it’s 1931, what happens next? What’s with Niall Ferguson? Hey, this reminds me of the Democrats in the U.S. . . . Would President Romney contract the economy? Inconsistency with prior knowledge triggers children’s causal explanatory reasoning
2 0.22601335 1493 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-12-Niall Ferguson, the John Yoo line, and the paradox of influence
Introduction: Life is continuous but we think in discrete terms. In applied statistics there’s the p=.05 line which tells us whether a finding is significant or not. Baseball has the Mendoza line. And academia has what might be called the John Yoo line : the point at which nothing you write gets taken seriously, and so you might as well become a hack because you have no scholarly reputation remaining. John Yoo, of course, became a hack because, I assume, he had nothing left to lose. In contrast, historian Niall Ferguson has reportedly been moved to hackery because he has so much to gain . At least that is the analysis of Stephen Marche ( link from Basbøll): Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent’s Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. . . . Tha
3 0.22468948 1494 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-13-Watching the sharks jump
Introduction: Recently in the sister blog: Niall Ferguson is a hack . Niall Ferguson is not always a hack, sometimes he just makes silly mistakes . Paul Krugman is not a hack, but he sometimes he goes over the top . Reflections on hacks . P.S. Yes, technically I’m misusing the expression, it should really be something like, “Watching the sharks get jumped.” But I liked the image of the jumping shark.
4 0.21981899 1921 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-01-Going meta on Niall Ferguson
Introduction: Ashok Rao shreds the latest book from Niall Ferguson, who we’ve encountered most recently as the source of homophobic slurs but who used to be a serious scholar . Or maybe still is. Remember Linda, that character from the Kahneman and Tversky vignette who was deemed likely to be “a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement”? Maybe Ferguson is a serious scholar who is active in the being-a-hack movement. Perhaps when he’s not writing books where he distorts his sources, or giving lectures with unfortunate slurs, he’s doing historical research. It’s certainly possible. Rao describes how Ferguson distorts his source materials. This is a no-no for any historian, of course, but not such a surprise for Ferguson, who crossed over the John Yoo line awhile ago. Last year I wrote about the paradox of influence: Ferguson gets and keeps the big-money audience by telling them not what he (Ferguson) wants to say—not by giving them his unique insights and understanding—but rat
Introduction: History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports : Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated. . . . Ferguson . . . says it’s only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an “effete” member of society. . . . Throughout his remarks, Ferguson referred to his “friends” in high places. They should all be embarrassed and ashamed of such a connection to such small-minded thinking. Ferguson says U.S. laws and institutions have become degenerate. Acc
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same-blog 1 0.98029447 1396 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Recently in the sister blog
Introduction: If Paul Krugman is right and it’s 1931, what happens next? What’s with Niall Ferguson? Hey, this reminds me of the Democrats in the U.S. . . . Would President Romney contract the economy? Inconsistency with prior knowledge triggers children’s causal explanatory reasoning
Introduction: We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and marrying a ballerina and talking about poetry. The general idea, I think, is that people without kids don’t care so much about the future, and this motivated Keynes’s party-all-the-time attitude, which might have worked just fine for Eddie Murphy’s girlfriend in the 1980s and in San Francisco bathhouses of the 1970s but, according to Ferguson, is not the ticket for preserving today’s American empire. Some of the more robust defenders of Ferguson may have been disappointed by his followup remarks: “I should not have suggested . . . that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was g
3 0.77467853 1034 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-29-World Class Speakers and Entertainers
Introduction: In our discussion of historian Niall Ferguson and piss-poor monocausal social science, commenter Matt W. pointed to Ferguson’s listing at a speakers bureau. One of his talks is entitled “Is This the Chinese Century?” The question mark at the end seems to give him some wiggle room. I give some paid lectures myself and was curious to learn more about this organization, World Class Speakers and Entertainers, so I clicked through to this list of topics and then searched for Statistics. Amazingly enough, there was a “Statistician” category (right above “Story Teller / Lore / Art / Power of Story Telling,” “Strategist / Strategies / Strategic Planning,” and “Success”). There I found Gopal C. Dorai, Ph.D. , who offers insights such as “vegetarians usually will not eat meat products, no matter how hungry they feel.” And “Cheating or lying for the sake of obtaining favorable treatment from others will be anathema to some people.” And “Life is a one-way-street; we cannot turn the c
4 0.77273929 1839 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-04-Jesus historian Niall Ferguson and the improving standards of public discourse
Introduction: History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports : Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated. . . . Ferguson . . . says it’s only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an “effete” member of society. . . . Throughout his remarks, Ferguson referred to his “friends” in high places. They should all be embarrassed and ashamed of such a connection to such small-minded thinking. Ferguson says U.S. laws and institutions have become degenerate. Acc
5 0.76096725 1493 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-12-Niall Ferguson, the John Yoo line, and the paradox of influence
Introduction: Life is continuous but we think in discrete terms. In applied statistics there’s the p=.05 line which tells us whether a finding is significant or not. Baseball has the Mendoza line. And academia has what might be called the John Yoo line : the point at which nothing you write gets taken seriously, and so you might as well become a hack because you have no scholarly reputation remaining. John Yoo, of course, became a hack because, I assume, he had nothing left to lose. In contrast, historian Niall Ferguson has reportedly been moved to hackery because he has so much to gain . At least that is the analysis of Stephen Marche ( link from Basbøll): Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent’s Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. . . . Tha
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same-blog 1 0.96093142 1396 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Recently in the sister blog
Introduction: If Paul Krugman is right and it’s 1931, what happens next? What’s with Niall Ferguson? Hey, this reminds me of the Democrats in the U.S. . . . Would President Romney contract the economy? Inconsistency with prior knowledge triggers children’s causal explanatory reasoning
2 0.91812283 893 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-06-Julian Symons on Frances Newman
Introduction: “She was forty years old when she died. It is possible that her art might have developed to include a wider area of human experience, just as possible that the chilling climate of the thirties might have withered it altogether. But what she actually wrote was greatly talented. She deserves a place, although obviously not a foremost one, in any literary history of the years between the wars. The last letter she wrote, or rather dictated, to the printer of the Laforgue translations shows the invariable fastidiousness of her talent, a fastidiousness which is often infuriating but just as often impressive, and is in any case rare enough to be worth remembrance: To the Printer of Six Moral Tales This book is to be spelled and its words are to be hyphenated according to the usage of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Page introduction continuously with the tales. Do not put brackets around the numbers of the pages. All the ‘todays’ and all the ‘tomorrows’ should be spelled w
3 0.89926898 1067 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-18-Christopher Hitchens was a Bayesian
Introduction: 1. We Bayesian statisticians like to say there are three kinds of statisticians: a. Bayesians; b. People who are Bayesians but don’t realize it (that is, they act in coherence with some unstated probability); c. Failed Bayesians (that is, people whose inference could be improved by some attention to coherence). So, if a statistician does great work, we are inclined to claim this person for the Bayesian cause, even if he or she vehemently denies any Bayesian leanings. 2. In his autobiography, Bertrand Russell tells the story of when he went to prison for opposing World War 1: I [Russell] was much cheered on my arrival by the warden at the gate, who had to take particulars about me. He asked my religion, and I replied ‘agnostic.’ He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: “Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.” This remark kept me cheerful for about a week. 3. In an op-ed today, Ross Douthat argues that celebrated a
4 0.86570209 522 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-18-Problems with Haiti elections?
Introduction: Mark Weisbrot points me to this report trashing a recent OAS report on Haiti’s elections. Weisbrot writes: The two simplest things that are wrong with the OAS analysis are: (1) By looking only at a sample of the tally sheets and not using any statistical test, they have no idea how many other tally sheets would also be thrown out by the same criteria that they used, and how that would change the result and (2) The missing/quarantined tally sheets are much greater in number than the ones that they threw out; our analysis indicates that if these votes had been counted, the result would go the other way. I have not had a chance to take a look at this myself but I’m posting it here so that experts on election irregularities can see this and give their judgments. P.S. Weisbrot updates: We [Weisbrot et al.] published our actual paper on the OAS Mission’s Report today. The press release is here and gives a very good summary of the major problems with the OAS Mission rep
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Introduction: Marty McKee at Wolfram Research appears to have a very very stupid colleague. McKee wrote to Christian Robert: Your article, “Evidence and Evolution: A review”, caught the attention of one of my colleagues, who thought that it could be developed into an interesting Demonstration to add to the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. As Christian points out, adapting his book review into a computer demonstration would be quite a feat! I wonder what McKee’s colleague could be thinking? I recommend that Wolfram fire McKee’s colleague immediately: what an idiot! P.S. I’m not actually sure that McKee was the author of this email; I’m guessing this was the case because this other very similar email was written under his name. P.P.S. To head off the inevitable comments: Yes, yes, I know this is no big deal and I shouldn’t get bent out of shape about it. But . . . Wolfram Research has contributed such great things to the world, that I hate to think of them wasting any money paying
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