andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1411 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Robin Hanson writes that he does’t use slang: I [Hanson] am not into slang. I want to talk to the widest possible audience, and to focus on timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics. I can see why people want to signal loyalty to their groups, especially in the military, but I have little confidence that this is good for the world as a whole. I don’t know anything about the military (I don’t think this really counts) so I can’t comment on that part, and I don’t see the opposition between slang and “timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics” (after all, Mark Twain used slang and he had some timeless insights), but I’d like to pick up on a slightly different angle here, which is the set of quasi-arbitrary choices we make in order to define ourselves. Robin Hanson happens not to use much slang and he uses this trait to define himself, not quite to stand out in the crowd but to put himself on one end of a scale. I
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1 Robin Hanson writes that he does’t use slang: I [Hanson] am not into slang. [sent-1, score-0.075]
2 I want to talk to the widest possible audience, and to focus on timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics. [sent-2, score-0.842]
3 I can see why people want to signal loyalty to their groups, especially in the military, but I have little confidence that this is good for the world as a whole. [sent-3, score-0.142]
4 Robin Hanson happens not to use much slang and he uses this trait to define himself, not quite to stand out in the crowd but to put himself on one end of a scale. [sent-5, score-1.145]
5 I wear nice clothes and a tie to work every day. [sent-6, score-0.238]
6 I don’t have to, in fact it puts me on the fancy end of the dress scale at the university, it just feels appropriate to me. [sent-7, score-0.408]
7 I think (with no particular evidence) that I’ll be effective if I dress-for-work for work, also I feel that it shows respect for students to dress in my “uniform. [sent-8, score-0.228]
8 ” And this ends up being part of how I define myself. [sent-9, score-0.355]
9 I’m pretty sure that some psychologists somewhere have studied this more systematically; the above is just my personal bloggy take. [sent-11, score-0.156]
10 I was amused (and slightly disappointed) that all the comments on this post have been on the definition of “slang” and nothing on my main point about our desire to define ourselves arbitrarily. [sent-14, score-0.519]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 1411 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-10-Defining ourselves arbitrarily
Introduction: Robin Hanson writes that he does’t use slang: I [Hanson] am not into slang. I want to talk to the widest possible audience, and to focus on timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics. I can see why people want to signal loyalty to their groups, especially in the military, but I have little confidence that this is good for the world as a whole. I don’t know anything about the military (I don’t think this really counts) so I can’t comment on that part, and I don’t see the opposition between slang and “timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics” (after all, Mark Twain used slang and he had some timeless insights), but I’d like to pick up on a slightly different angle here, which is the set of quasi-arbitrary choices we make in order to define ourselves. Robin Hanson happens not to use much slang and he uses this trait to define himself, not quite to stand out in the crowd but to put himself on one end of a scale. I
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen quotes Robin Hanson: If your main reason for talking is to socialize, you’ll want to talk about whatever everyone else is talking about. Like say the missing Malaysia Airlines plane. But if instead your purpose is to gain and spread useful insight, so that we can all understand more about things that matter, you’ll want to look for relatively neglected topics. . . . One advantage of having this blog on a lag of a month or two is that I can post things, knowing that when my discussion finally appears, it will no longer be topical. Indeed, this post is an example.
3 0.13498357 1463 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-19-It is difficult to convey intonation in typed speech
Introduction: I just wanted to add the above comment to Bob’s notes on language. Spoken (and, to some extent, handwritten) language can be much more expressive than the typed version. I’m not just talking about slang or words such as baaaaad; I’m also talking about pauses that give logical structure to a sentence. For example, sentences such as “The girl who hit the ball where the dog used to be was the one who was climbing the tree when the dog came by” are effortless to understand in speech but can be difficult for a reader to follow. Often when I write, I need to untangle my sentences to keep them readable.
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Introduction: Tim Hanson sends along this paper (coauthored with Adam Branscum and Wesley Johnson): Eliciting information from experts for use in constructing prior distributions for logistic regression coefficients can be challenging. The task is especially difficult when the model contains many predictor variables, because the expert is asked to provide summary information about the probability of “success” for many subgroups of the population. Often, however, experts are confident only in their assessment of the population as a whole. This paper is about incorporating such overall, marginal or averaged, information easily into a logistic regression data analysis by using g-priors. We present a version of the g-prior such that the prior distribution on the probability of success can be set to closely match a beta dis- tribution, when averaged over the set of predictors in a logistic regression. A simple data augmentation formulation that can be implemented in standard statistical software pac
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Introduction: Robin Hanson writes on paid expert consulting (of the sort that I do sometime, and is common among economists and statisticians). Hanson agrees with Keith Yost, who says: Fellow consultants and associates . . . [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it. On the other side is Steven Levitt, who Hanson quotes as saying: My own experience has been that even though I know nothing about an industry, if you give me a week, and you get a bunch of really smart people to explain the industry to me, and to tell me what they do, a lot of times what I’ve learned in economics, what I’ve learned in other places can actually be really helpful in changing the way that they see the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly given my Bayesian attitudes and my preference for continuity , I’m inclined to split the d
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Introduction: Robin Hanson writes that he does’t use slang: I [Hanson] am not into slang. I want to talk to the widest possible audience, and to focus on timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics. I can see why people want to signal loyalty to their groups, especially in the military, but I have little confidence that this is good for the world as a whole. I don’t know anything about the military (I don’t think this really counts) so I can’t comment on that part, and I don’t see the opposition between slang and “timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics” (after all, Mark Twain used slang and he had some timeless insights), but I’d like to pick up on a slightly different angle here, which is the set of quasi-arbitrary choices we make in order to define ourselves. Robin Hanson happens not to use much slang and he uses this trait to define himself, not quite to stand out in the crowd but to put himself on one end of a scale. I
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Introduction: Regular readers of this blog know about the Bechdel test for movies: 1. It has to have at least two women in it 2. Who talk to each other 3. About something besides a man Amusing, huh? But I only really got the point the other day, when I was on a plane and passively watched parts of the in-flight movie. It was something I’d never heard of (of course) and it happened to be a chick flick–even without the soundtrack, it was clear that the main character was a woman and much of it was about her love life. But even this movie failed the Bechdel test miserably! I don’t even think it passed item #1 above, but if it did, it certainly failed #2. If even the chick flicks are failing the Bechdel test, then, yeah, we’re really in trouble. And don’t get me started on those old Warner Brothers cartoons. They’re great but they feature about as many female characters as the average WWII submarine. Sure, everybody knows this, but it’s still striking to think about just how unbalanced
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Introduction: On this blog I’ve occasionally written about the problems that arise when economists act as amateur psychologists. But the problem can go the other way, too. For example, consider this blog by Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow ( link from Abbas Raza). Brogaard and Marlow give several amusing stories about ripoffs (a restaurant that scams customers into buying expensive bottles of wine, a hairdresser that sucks customers into unnecessary treatments, a ghostwriter who takes thousands of dollars in payments and doesn’t do the job, etc.). Then they ask, “How did it happen? Why did you act in this impulsive way? Why didn’t you learn your lesson the first time around? Do you have some kind of brain damage?” They continue with some discussion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the anterior insula, etc etc etc., and then conclude with the following advice: Is there anything we can do to avoid these moments of crazy decision-making? Yes but only by intentionally turning on our
Introduction: In this article , Oliver Sacks talks about his extreme difficulty in recognizing people (even close friends) and places (even extremely familiar locations such as his apartment and his office). After reading this, I started to wonder if I have a very mild case of face-blindness. I’m very good at recognizing places, but I’m not good at faces. And I can’t really visualize faces at all. Like Sacks and some of his correspondents, I often have to do it by cheating, by recognizing certain landmarks that I can remember, thus coding the face linguistically rather than visually. (On the other hand, when thinking about mathematics or statistics, I’m very visual, as readers of this blog can attest.) Anyway, in searching for the link to Sacks’s article, I came across the “ Cambridge Face Memory Test .” My reaction when taking this test was mostly irritation. I just found it annoying to stare at all these unadorned faces, and in my attempt to memorize them, I was trying to use trick
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Introduction: Mark Patterson writes: I found a discussion at the Boston Review that I thought you’d be interested in, given your posts on the potentially dubious foundations of many neoclassical economics models. Michael Sandel cites a few examples of markets crowding out moral behavior. His longest discussion regards Frey and Oberholzer-Gee’s work demonstrating Swiss citizens’ willingness to admit a nuclear waste facility to town decreasing when offered monetary incentives. It seems like this is a situation that really demands a discussion of the available empirical evidence (Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini have two papers, “Pay Enough or Don’t Pay At All” and “A Fine is a Price” that seem especially relevant.) While the essay has sparked the usual sort of libertarian response, I’m struck by the fact that most people aren’t talking about the experimental work that’s actually available—it seems like this is the best way forward. My reply: I don’t have much to add here, but this sort
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Introduction: Mickey Kaus does a public service by trashing Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum that “all politics are local.” As Kaus point out, all the congressional elections in recent decades have been nationalized. I’d go one step further and say that, sure, all politics are local–if you’re Tip O’Neill and represent a ironclad Democratic seat in Congress. It’s easy to be smug about your political skills if you’re in a safe seat and have enough pull in state politics to avoid your district getting gerrymandered. Then you can sit there and sagely attribute your success to your continuing mastery of local politics rather than to whatever it took to get the seat in the first place.
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Introduction: From 2011: Chapter 1 On Sunday we were over on 125 St so I stopped by the Jamaican beef patties place but they were closed. Jesus Taco was next door so I went there instead. What a mistake! I don’t know what Masanao and Yu-Sung could’ve been thinking. Anyway, then I had Jamaican beef patties on the brain so I went by Monday afternoon and asked for 9: 3 spicy beef, 3 mild beef (for the kids), and 3 chicken (not the jerk chicken; Bob got those the other day and they didn’t impress me). I’m about to pay and then a bunch of people come in and start ordering. The woman behind the counter asks if I’m in a hurry, I ask why, she whispers, For the same price you can get a dozen. So I get two more spicy beef and a chicken. She whispers that I shouldn’t tell anyone. I can’t really figure out why I’m getting this special treatment. So I walk out of there with 12 patties. Total cost: $17.25. It’s a good deal: they’re small but not that small. Sure, I ate 6 of them, but I was h
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Introduction: Chapter 1 On Sunday we were over on 125 St so I stopped by the Jamaican beef patties place but they were closed. Jesus Taco was next door so I went there instead. What a mistake! I don’t know what Masanao and Yu-Sung could’ve been thinking. Anyway, then I had Jamaican beef patties on the brain so I went by Monday afternoon and asked for 9: 3 spicy beef, 3 mild beef (for the kids), and 3 chicken (not the jerk chicken; Bob got those the other day and they didn’t impress me). I’m about to pay and then a bunch of people come in and start ordering. The woman behind the counter asks if I’m in a hurry, I ask why, she whispers, For the same price you can get a dozen. So I get two more spicy beef and a chicken. She whispers that I shouldn’t tell anyone. I can’t really figure out why I’m getting this special treatment. So I walk out of there with 12 patties. Total cost: $17.25. It’s a good deal: they’re small but not that small. Sure, I ate 6 of them, but I was hungry. Chapt
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Introduction: Cassie Murdoch reports : A 47-year-old woman in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, got behind the wheel of her car after having a bit too much to drink, but instead of wreaking havoc on the road, she ended up lodged in a sand trap at a local golf course. Why? Because her GPS made her do it—obviously! She said the GPS told her to turn left, and she did, right into a cornfield. That didn’t faze her, and she just kept on going until she ended up on the golf course and got stuck in the sand. There were people on the course at the time, but thankfully nobody was injured. Police found a cup full of alcohol in her car and arrested her for driving drunk. Here’s the punchline: This is the fourth time she’s been arrested for a DUI. Assuming this story is accurate, I guess they don’t have one of those “three strikes” laws in Massachusetts? Personally, I’m a lot more afraid of a dangerous driver than of some drug dealer. I’d think a simple cost-benefit calculation would recommend taking away
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Introduction: Robin Hanson writes that he does’t use slang: I [Hanson] am not into slang. I want to talk to the widest possible audience, and to focus on timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics. I can see why people want to signal loyalty to their groups, especially in the military, but I have little confidence that this is good for the world as a whole. I don’t know anything about the military (I don’t think this really counts) so I can’t comment on that part, and I don’t see the opposition between slang and “timeless issues and insights, as opposed to the latest fashionable topics” (after all, Mark Twain used slang and he had some timeless insights), but I’d like to pick up on a slightly different angle here, which is the set of quasi-arbitrary choices we make in order to define ourselves. Robin Hanson happens not to use much slang and he uses this trait to define himself, not quite to stand out in the crowd but to put himself on one end of a scale. I
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