andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1408 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Thomas Basbøll writes : [Advertising executive] Russell Davies wrote a blog post called “The Tyranny of the Big Idea”. His five-point procedure begins: Start doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often. Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and do it differently. And ends with: “And something else and something else.” This inspires several thoughts, which I’ll take advantage of the blog format to present with no attempt to be cohesively organized. 1. My first concern is the extent to which productivity-enhancing advice such as Davies’s (and Basbøll’s) is zero or even negative-sum , just helping people in the rat race. But, upon reflection, I’d rate the recommendations as positive-sum. If people learn to write better and be more productive, that’s not (necessarily) just positional. 2. Blogging fits with the “Do it quickly and do it often” advice. 3. I wonder what Basbøll thinks abo
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1 Thomas Basbøll writes : [Advertising executive] Russell Davies wrote a blog post called “The Tyranny of the Big Idea”. [sent-1, score-0.094]
2 His five-point procedure begins: Start doing stuff. [sent-2, score-0.073]
3 And ends with: “And something else and something else. [sent-8, score-0.082]
4 ” This inspires several thoughts, which I’ll take advantage of the blog format to present with no attempt to be cohesively organized. [sent-9, score-0.459]
5 My first concern is the extent to which productivity-enhancing advice such as Davies’s (and Basbøll’s) is zero or even negative-sum , just helping people in the rat race. [sent-11, score-0.412]
6 But, upon reflection, I’d rate the recommendations as positive-sum. [sent-12, score-0.154]
7 If people learn to write better and be more productive, that’s not (necessarily) just positional. [sent-13, score-0.077]
8 Blogging fits with the “Do it quickly and do it often” advice. [sent-15, score-0.302]
9 I wonder what Basbøll thinks about the “Don’t repeat much” advice. [sent-17, score-0.243]
10 His blog is interesting but for awhile he seems to have been going with the same big idea (structure your writing as paragraphs, write them one at a time). [sent-18, score-0.426]
11 Davies’s advice to try different things contradicts the usual recommendation to “market the brand of you. [sent-20, score-1.009]
12 ” I can try different things because I already have a brand of me (and part of that brand is that I try different things), but that can’t work for everybody. [sent-21, score-1.242]
13 I’m also reminded of the message I often give in the context of statistical graphics, that there is not much difference between communicating to self and communicating to others. [sent-23, score-0.566]
14 Clear writing is not just about marketing an already-formed idea; it’s also about exploring and explaining it to yourself. [sent-25, score-0.345]
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Introduction: Thomas Basbøll writes : [Advertising executive] Russell Davies wrote a blog post called “The Tyranny of the Big Idea”. His five-point procedure begins: Start doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often. Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and do it differently. And ends with: “And something else and something else.” This inspires several thoughts, which I’ll take advantage of the blog format to present with no attempt to be cohesively organized. 1. My first concern is the extent to which productivity-enhancing advice such as Davies’s (and Basbøll’s) is zero or even negative-sum , just helping people in the rat race. But, upon reflection, I’d rate the recommendations as positive-sum. If people learn to write better and be more productive, that’s not (necessarily) just positional. 2. Blogging fits with the “Do it quickly and do it often” advice. 3. I wonder what Basbøll thinks abo
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Introduction: In an article entitled 16 Weeks, Thomas Basbøll ruthlessly lays out the time constraints that limit what a student will be able to write during a semester and recommends that students follow a plan: Try to be realistic. If you need time for “free writing” or “thought writing” (writing to find out what you think) book that into your calendar as well, but the important part of the challenge is to find time to write down what you already know needs to be written. If you don’t yet know what you’re going to say this semester, then your challenge is, in part, to figure that out. But you should still find at least 30 minutes a day to write down something you know you want to say. Keep in mind that we are only talking about sixteen weeks in the very near future. . . . Assuming that you do have something say, then, here’s the challenge: write always and only when (and what) your calendar tells you to. Don’t write when “inspired” to do so (unless this happens to coincide with your writing s
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Introduction: Basbøll writes : I [Basbøll] have got to come up with forty things to say [in the next few months]. . . . What would you like me to write about? I’ll of course be writing quite a bit about what I’m now calling “article design”, i.e., how to map out the roughly forty paragraphs that a journal article is composed of. And I’ll also be talking about how to plan the writing process that is to produce those paragraphs. The basic principle is still to write at least one paragraph a day in 27 minutes. (You can adapt this is various ways to your own taste; some like 18-minute or even 13-minute paragraphs.) But I’d like to talk about questions of style, too, and even a little bit about epistemology. “Knowledge—academic knowledge, that is—is the ability to compose a coherent prose paragraph about something in 27 minutes,” I always say. I’d like to reflect a little more about what this conception of knowledge really means. This means I’ll have to walk back my recent dismissal of epistemol
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Introduction: This isn’t quite right—poetry, too, can be in paragraph form (see Auden, for example, or Frost, or lots of other examples)—but Basbøll is on to something here. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s hilarious “From the Index of First Lines,” which is truly the poetic counterpart to Basbøll’s argument in prose:
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Introduction: Thomas Basbøll writes : [Advertising executive] Russell Davies wrote a blog post called “The Tyranny of the Big Idea”. His five-point procedure begins: Start doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often. Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and do it differently. And ends with: “And something else and something else.” This inspires several thoughts, which I’ll take advantage of the blog format to present with no attempt to be cohesively organized. 1. My first concern is the extent to which productivity-enhancing advice such as Davies’s (and Basbøll’s) is zero or even negative-sum , just helping people in the rat race. But, upon reflection, I’d rate the recommendations as positive-sum. If people learn to write better and be more productive, that’s not (necessarily) just positional. 2. Blogging fits with the “Do it quickly and do it often” advice. 3. I wonder what Basbøll thinks abo
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Introduction: Lyric Semiconductor posted: For over 60 years, computers have been based on digital computing principles. Data is represented as bits (0s and 1s). Boolean logic gates perform operations on these bits. A processor steps through many of these operations serially in order to perform a function. However, today’s most interesting problems are not at all suited to this approach. Here at Lyric Semiconductor, we are redesigning information processing circuits from the ground up to natively process probabilities: from the gate circuits to the processor architecture to the programming language. As a result, many applications that today require a thousand conventional processors will soon run in just one Lyric processor, providing 1,000x efficiencies in cost, power, and size. Om Malik has some more information, also relating to the team and the business. The fundamental idea is that computing architectures work deterministically, even though the world is fundamentally stochastic.
Introduction: Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel’s former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . . . However, the Committees were of the opinion that the main bulk of the work had not yet even started. . . . Journal publications can often leave traces that reach far into and even beyond scientific disciplines. The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature. In addition, based on their initial impressions, the Committees believed that there were other serious issues within Mr Stapel’s publications . . . This brought into the spotlight a research culture in which this sloppy science, alongside out-and-out fraud, was able to remain undetected
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