andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1453 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: When linking to my review of Duncan Watts’s book in a recent post, I came across some fun bits that I’d like to share (for those of you who didn’t just click through and read the whole thing): On business books: I’m not so interested in the business angle but I suppose that’s how you sell books these days. The business part of the book was ok—I’m not saying it was filler—it’s just that I’m not particularly interested in which format of videocassette wins, or whether Cisco Systems is a well-run company. I realize that a lot of people care about this sort of things nowadays, but I’d rather talk about sports or politics. On dodgy science writer John Gribbin: Sure, people write all sorts of silly things but usually they have some sort of political or religious excuse for why it’s ok to believe them. Truth is not the only important value in life, there are also other concerns such as political convictions, religious beliefs, and the simple desire to avoid offending people. Thus
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 The business part of the book was ok—I’m not saying it was filler—it’s just that I’m not particularly interested in which format of videocassette wins, or whether Cisco Systems is a well-run company. [sent-2, score-0.201]
2 I realize that a lot of people care about this sort of things nowadays, but I’d rather talk about sports or politics. [sent-3, score-0.068]
3 On dodgy science writer John Gribbin: Sure, people write all sorts of silly things but usually they have some sort of political or religious excuse for why it’s ok to believe them. [sent-4, score-0.234]
4 Truth is not the only important value in life, there are also other concerns such as political convictions, religious beliefs, and the simple desire to avoid offending people. [sent-5, score-0.245]
5 Thus, I could understand someone falsifying data in order to support a political conclusion–it’s not something I would imagine doing except in extreme cases, but I can see the moral rationale for it—or even for the purpose of public health. [sent-6, score-0.15]
6 ) On not letting killers off the hook: Duncan describes the story of a person who killed some people while driving a car under the influence of alcohol and points out the difficult in imposing punishment. [sent-8, score-0.434]
7 On one hand, the driver presumably didn’t intend to kill that family, thus maybe the punishment shouldn’t be so harsh. [sent-9, score-0.154]
8 On the other hand, there would seem to be no political will for generally imposing harsh penalties on dangerous driving in the vast majority of cases where nobody gets hurt. [sent-10, score-0.507]
9 In thinking about this sort of example, I would separate two concerns: 1. [sent-11, score-0.068]
10 Duncan writes, “it seems grossly disproportionate to treat every otherwise, decent honest person who has ever had a few too many drinks and driven home as a criminal and a killer. [sent-17, score-0.652]
11 Yet, aside from the trembling hand of fate, there is no difference between these two instances. [sent-18, score-0.154]
12 First, who’s to say that the driver in question is an “otherwise decent, honest person”? [sent-20, score-0.291]
13 And, even if you’re driving drunk, it’s possible to account for that to some extent. [sent-22, score-0.142]
14 I was once in a taxi in Chicago where the driver reeked of alcohol. [sent-23, score-0.229]
15 I don’t think it’s too much to ask of an otherwise decent, honest person that, if he does drive drunk, that he recognize he might be impaired, that he stop at every stop sign and every yellow and red light, and that he drives below the speed limit. [sent-26, score-0.63]
16 After all, it’s not like this dude hadn’t driven drunk before (see point 2 above). [sent-27, score-0.275]
17 ” Here’s another example: the head of a casino company says, “There are two ways to get fired from Harrah’s: stealing from the company, or failing to include a proper control group in your business experiment. [sent-29, score-0.597]
18 Can you imagine the president of Columbia saying, “There are two ways to get fired from Columbia: molesting a student, or failing to include a proper control group in your teaching experiment. [sent-31, score-0.567]
19 But the funny thing is, I’m pretty sure Columbia would be a better university if we were required to continually work on improving our teaching and if we were required to take careful measurements and use control groups and clearly-defined treatments. [sent-33, score-0.41]
20 Columbia is a pretty free place, though, so the administration can’t make us formally experiment in our teaching (even in the unlikely event that they wanted us to). [sent-34, score-0.096]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('duncan', 0.271), ('yahoo', 0.252), ('columbia', 0.236), ('drunk', 0.176), ('decent', 0.173), ('driver', 0.154), ('driving', 0.142), ('harrah', 0.141), ('honest', 0.137), ('business', 0.126), ('imposing', 0.123), ('failing', 0.108), ('fired', 0.107), ('otherwise', 0.105), ('person', 0.104), ('driven', 0.099), ('teaching', 0.096), ('dangerous', 0.095), ('proper', 0.091), ('control', 0.09), ('religious', 0.086), ('political', 0.08), ('university', 0.08), ('hand', 0.079), ('concerns', 0.079), ('company', 0.075), ('cabbie', 0.075), ('cisco', 0.075), ('molesting', 0.075), ('reeked', 0.075), ('trembling', 0.075), ('videocassette', 0.075), ('zara', 0.075), ('stop', 0.073), ('required', 0.072), ('drinks', 0.07), ('falsifying', 0.07), ('filler', 0.07), ('gribbin', 0.07), ('linus', 0.07), ('pauling', 0.07), ('every', 0.069), ('sort', 0.068), ('convictions', 0.067), ('discouraging', 0.067), ('penalties', 0.067), ('recall', 0.067), ('killers', 0.065), ('homicide', 0.065), ('chemist', 0.065)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000002 1453 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-10-Quotes from me!
Introduction: When linking to my review of Duncan Watts’s book in a recent post, I came across some fun bits that I’d like to share (for those of you who didn’t just click through and read the whole thing): On business books: I’m not so interested in the business angle but I suppose that’s how you sell books these days. The business part of the book was ok—I’m not saying it was filler—it’s just that I’m not particularly interested in which format of videocassette wins, or whether Cisco Systems is a well-run company. I realize that a lot of people care about this sort of things nowadays, but I’d rather talk about sports or politics. On dodgy science writer John Gribbin: Sure, people write all sorts of silly things but usually they have some sort of political or religious excuse for why it’s ok to believe them. Truth is not the only important value in life, there are also other concerns such as political convictions, religious beliefs, and the simple desire to avoid offending people. Thus
2 0.58125931 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
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
3 0.20258909 978 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-28-Cool job opening with brilliant researchers at Yahoo
Introduction: Duncan Watts writes: The Human Social Dynamics Group in Yahoo Research is seeking highly qualified candidates for a post-doctoral research scientist position. The Human and Social Dynamics group is devoted to understanding the interplay between individual-level behavior (e.g. how people make decisions about what music they like, which dates to go on, or which groups to join) and the social environment in which individual behavior necessarily plays itself out. In particular, we are interested in: * Structure and evolution of social groups and networks * Decision making, social influence, diffusion, and collective decisions * Networking and collaborative problem solving. The intrinsically multi-disciplinary and cross-cutting nature of the subject demands an eclectic range of researchers, both in terms of domain-expertise (e.g. decision sciences, social psychology, sociology) and technical skills (e.g. statistical analysis, mathematical modeling, computer simulations, design o
Introduction: We’re doing a new thing here at the Applied Statistics Center, throwing monthly Friday afternoon mini-conferences in the Playroom (inspired by our successful miniconference on statistical consulting a couple years ago). This Friday (10 Sept), 1-5pm : Come join us this Friday, September 10th for an engaging interdisciplinary discussion of risk perception at the individual and societal level, and the role it plays in current environmental, social, and health policy debates. All are welcome! “Risk Perception in Environmental Decision-Making” Elke Weber, Columbia Business School “Cultural Cognition and the Problem of Science Communication” Dan Kahan, Yale Law School Discussants include: Michael Gerrard, Columbia Law School David Epstein, Department of Political Science, Columbia University Andrew Gelman, Department of Statistics, Columbia University
5 0.13453454 993 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-05-The sort of thing that gives technocratic reasoning a bad name
Introduction: 1. Freakonomics characterizes drunk driving as an example of “the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen.” 2. The CDC reports , “Alcohol-impaired drivers are involved in about 1 in 3 crash deaths, resulting in nearly 11,000 deaths in 2009.” No offense to the tenured faculty at the University of Chicago, but I’m going with the CDC on this one. P.S. The Freakonomics blog deserves to be dinged another time, not just for claiming, based on implausible assumptions and making the all-else-equal fallacy that “drunk walking is 8 times more likely to result in your death than drunk driving” but for presenting this weak inference as a fact rather than as a speculation. When doing “Freakonomics,” you can be counterintuitive, or you can be sensible, but it’s hard to be both. I mean, sure, sometimes you can be. But there’s a tradeoff, and in this case, they’re choosing to push the envelope on counterintuitiveness.
6 0.12856162 1935 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-12-“A tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses”
7 0.1279552 1417 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-15-Some decision analysis problems are pretty easy, no?
9 0.12607872 2122 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-03-Objects of the class “Lawrence Summers”: Arne Duncan edition
10 0.12588194 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
11 0.11308144 2297 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-20-Fooled by randomness
12 0.10918249 1789 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-05-Elites have alcohol problems too!
14 0.10494176 708 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-12-Improvement of 5 MPG: how many more auto deaths?
15 0.10376824 1780 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-28-Racism!
16 0.10054035 359 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-21-Applied Statistics Center miniconference: Statistical sampling in developing countries
17 0.095862076 970 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-24-Bell Labs
18 0.095040545 1864 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-20-Evaluating Columbia University’s Frontiers of Science course
19 0.093234941 1207 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-10-A quick suggestion
20 0.091499999 8 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-28-Advice to help the rich get richer
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.219), (1, -0.112), (2, -0.015), (3, 0.024), (4, -0.011), (5, 0.066), (6, 0.044), (7, 0.038), (8, 0.006), (9, 0.05), (10, -0.054), (11, -0.029), (12, 0.028), (13, -0.034), (14, -0.003), (15, -0.004), (16, 0.034), (17, -0.025), (18, 0.064), (19, -0.026), (20, -0.02), (21, -0.031), (22, 0.022), (23, 0.004), (24, -0.018), (25, -0.0), (26, 0.003), (27, 0.005), (28, -0.054), (29, 0.011), (30, -0.037), (31, -0.0), (32, -0.026), (33, 0.021), (34, 0.017), (35, -0.033), (36, 0.043), (37, -0.016), (38, -0.012), (39, 0.003), (40, -0.001), (41, -0.032), (42, -0.025), (43, 0.023), (44, -0.017), (45, -0.015), (46, 0.056), (47, 0.052), (48, -0.003), (49, 0.05)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.95882416 1453 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-10-Quotes from me!
Introduction: When linking to my review of Duncan Watts’s book in a recent post, I came across some fun bits that I’d like to share (for those of you who didn’t just click through and read the whole thing): On business books: I’m not so interested in the business angle but I suppose that’s how you sell books these days. The business part of the book was ok—I’m not saying it was filler—it’s just that I’m not particularly interested in which format of videocassette wins, or whether Cisco Systems is a well-run company. I realize that a lot of people care about this sort of things nowadays, but I’d rather talk about sports or politics. On dodgy science writer John Gribbin: Sure, people write all sorts of silly things but usually they have some sort of political or religious excuse for why it’s ok to believe them. Truth is not the only important value in life, there are also other concerns such as political convictions, religious beliefs, and the simple desire to avoid offending people. Thus
2 0.88559151 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
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
3 0.84481621 1480 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-02-“If our product is harmful . . . we’ll stop making it.”
Introduction: After our discussion of the sad case of Darrell Huff, the celebrated “How to Lie with Statistics” guy who had a lucrative side career disparaging the link between smoking and cancer, I was motivated to follow John Mashey’s recommendation and read the book, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, by historian Robert Proctor. My first stop upon receiving the book was the index, in particular the entry for Rubin, Donald B. I followed the reference to pages 440-442 and found the description of Don’s activities to be accurate, neither diminished nor overstated, to the best of my knowledge. Rubin is the second-most-famous statistician to have been paid by the cigarette industry, but several other big and small names have been on the payroll at one time or another. Here’s a partial list . Just including the people I know or have heard of: Herbert Solomon, Stanford Richard Tweedie, Bond U Arnold Zellner, U of Chicago Paul Switzer, S
Introduction: Ever since I got this new sound system for my bike, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. This American Life is really good. I know, I know, everybody knows that, but it’s true. The only segments I don’t like are the ones that are too “writerly,” when they read a short story aloud. They don’t work for me. Most of the time, though, the show is as great as everyone says it is. Anyway, the other day I listened to program #466: Blackjack . It started with some items on card counting. That stuff is always fun. Then they get to the longer story, which is all about a moderately rich housewife from Iowa who, over a roughly ten-year period, lost her life savings, something like a million dollars, at Harrah’s casinos. Did you know they had casinos in Iowa and Indiana? I didn’t. Anyway, the lady was a gambling addict. That part’s pretty clear. You don’t lose your life savings at a casino by accident. The scary part, though, was how the casino company craftily enabled her to
5 0.80568099 698 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-05-Shocking but not surprising
Introduction: Much-honored playwright Tony Kushner was set to receive one more honor–a degree from John Jay College–but it was suddenly taken away from him on an 11-1 vote of the trustees of the City University of New York. This was the first rejection of an honorary degree nomination since 1961. The news article focuses on one trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime political aide, who opposed Kushner’s honorary degree, but to me the relevant point is that the committee as a whole voted 11-1 to ding him. Kusnher said, “I’m sickened,” he added, “that this is happening in New York City. Shocked, really.” I can see why he’s shocked, but perhaps it’s not so surprising that it’s happening in NYC. Recall the famous incident from 1940 in which Bertrand Russell was invited and then uninvited to teach at City College. The problem that time was Russell’s views on free love (as they called it back then). There seems to be a long tradition of city college officials being will
6 0.80270183 1539 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-18-IRB nightmares
9 0.78909349 732 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-26-What Do We Learn from Narrow Randomized Studies?
10 0.78875864 1600 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83
12 0.78351116 17 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-05-Taking philosophical arguments literally
13 0.78054541 1484 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-05-Two exciting movie ideas: “Second Chance U” and “The New Dirty Dozen”
14 0.77939379 335 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-11-How to think about Lou Dobbs
15 0.77929455 2158 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-03-Booze: Been There. Done That.
16 0.77733892 578 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-17-Credentialism, elite employment, and career aspirations
17 0.76668656 955 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-12-Why it doesn’t make sense to chew people out for not reading the help page
18 0.76500416 1789 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-05-Elites have alcohol problems too!
19 0.76472867 1370 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-07-Duncan Watts and the Titanic
20 0.76134169 1887 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-07-“Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending”
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.019), (2, 0.017), (5, 0.026), (16, 0.083), (21, 0.045), (24, 0.132), (53, 0.018), (59, 0.089), (63, 0.016), (72, 0.054), (77, 0.042), (81, 0.012), (86, 0.012), (90, 0.034), (93, 0.014), (99, 0.239)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.9510836 1453 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-10-Quotes from me!
Introduction: When linking to my review of Duncan Watts’s book in a recent post, I came across some fun bits that I’d like to share (for those of you who didn’t just click through and read the whole thing): On business books: I’m not so interested in the business angle but I suppose that’s how you sell books these days. The business part of the book was ok—I’m not saying it was filler—it’s just that I’m not particularly interested in which format of videocassette wins, or whether Cisco Systems is a well-run company. I realize that a lot of people care about this sort of things nowadays, but I’d rather talk about sports or politics. On dodgy science writer John Gribbin: Sure, people write all sorts of silly things but usually they have some sort of political or religious excuse for why it’s ok to believe them. Truth is not the only important value in life, there are also other concerns such as political convictions, religious beliefs, and the simple desire to avoid offending people. Thus
2 0.93985784 763 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-13-Inventor of Connect Four dies at 91
Introduction: Obit here . I think I have a cousin with the same last name as this guy, so maybe we’re related by marriage in some way. (By that standard we’re also related to Marge Simpson and, I seem to recall, the guy who wrote the scripts for Dark Shadows.)
3 0.93576735 517 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-14-Bayes in China update
Introduction: Some clarification on the Bayes-in-China issue raised last week : 1. We heard that the Chinese publisher cited the following pages that might contain politically objectionable materials: 3, 5, 21, 73, 112, 201. 2. It appears that, as some commenters suggested, the objection was to some of the applications, not to the Bayesian methods. 3. Our book is not censored in China. In fact, as some commenters mentioned, it is possible to buy it there, and it is also available in university libraries there. The edition of the book which was canceled was intended to be a low-cost reprint of the book. The original book is still available. I used the phrase “Banned in China” as a joke and I apologize if it was misinterpreted. 4. I have no quarrel with the Chinese government or with any Chinese publishers. They can publish whatever books they would like. I found this episode amusing only because I do not think my book on regression and multilevel models has any strong political co
4 0.92360705 1764 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-15-How do I make my graphs?
Introduction: Someone who wishes to remain anonymous writes: I’ve been following your blog a long time and enjoy your posts on visualization/statistical graphics matters. I don’t recall however you ever describing the details of your setup for plotting. I’m a new R user (convert from matplotlib) and would love to know your thoughts on the ideal setup: do you use mainly the R base? Do you use lattice? What do you think of ggplot2? etc. I found ggplot2 nearly indecipherable until a recent eureka moment, and I think its default theme is a waste tremendous ink (all those silly grey backgrounds and grids are really unnecessary), but if you customize that away it can be made to look like ordinary, pretty statistical graphs. Feel free to respond on your blog, but if you do, please remove my name from the post (my colleagues already make fun of me for thinking about visualization too much.) I love that last bit! Anyway, my response is that I do everything in base graphics (using my
5 0.92330015 214 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-17-Probability-processing hardware
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.
6 0.92220938 766 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-Last Wegman post (for now)
8 0.91927099 34 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-14-Non-academic writings on literature
10 0.91628778 15 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-03-Public Opinion on Health Care Reform
11 0.91395372 252 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-02-R needs a good function to make line plots
12 0.91321063 586 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-23-A statistical version of Arrow’s paradox
14 0.91160738 2264 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-24-On deck this month
15 0.91035539 789 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-07-Descriptive statistics, causal inference, and story time
16 0.91007644 2208 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-12-How to think about “identifiability” in Bayesian inference?
18 0.90975183 229 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-24-Bizarre twisty argument about medical diagnostic tests
19 0.90962505 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
20 0.90910965 427 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-23-Bayesian adaptive methods for clinical trials