andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1457 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: From Watership Down: There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight. Wow. OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom!), I wouldn’t see it as being in poor taste. But somehow, to this non-U.K. reader, Adams’s remark about “Irishmen” seems a bit over the top. I’m not criticizing it as offensive, exactly; it just is a bit jarring, and it’s kind of hard for me to believe someone would just write that as a throwaway line anymore. Things have changed a lot since 1971, I guess, or maybe in England an Irish joke is no more offensive/awkward than a joke about corrupt Chicagoans, loopy Californians, or crazy Floridians would be here.
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1 From Watership Down: There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight. [sent-1, score-1.539]
2 OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom! [sent-3, score-0.833]
3 reader, Adams’s remark about “Irishmen” seems a bit over the top. [sent-7, score-0.249]
4 I’m not criticizing it as offensive, exactly; it just is a bit jarring, and it’s kind of hard for me to believe someone would just write that as a throwaway line anymore. [sent-8, score-0.866]
5 Things have changed a lot since 1971, I guess, or maybe in England an Irish joke is no more offensive/awkward than a joke about corrupt Chicagoans, loopy Californians, or crazy Floridians would be here. [sent-9, score-1.307]
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same-blog 1 0.99999982 1457 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Retro ethnic slurs
Introduction: From Watership Down: There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight. Wow. OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom!), I wouldn’t see it as being in poor taste. But somehow, to this non-U.K. reader, Adams’s remark about “Irishmen” seems a bit over the top. I’m not criticizing it as offensive, exactly; it just is a bit jarring, and it’s kind of hard for me to believe someone would just write that as a throwaway line anymore. Things have changed a lot since 1971, I guess, or maybe in England an Irish joke is no more offensive/awkward than a joke about corrupt Chicagoans, loopy Californians, or crazy Floridians would be here.
2 0.13357255 854 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-15-A silly paper that tries to make fun of multilevel models
Introduction: Torkild Hovde Lyngstad writes: I wondered what your reaction would be to this paper from a recent issue of European Political Science. It came out already in March this year, so you might have seen it or even commented on it before. Is is a joke at the expense of the whole polisci discipline, a joke the Editors did not catch, or the sequel to the Sokal affair, just with quanto social science as the target? My reply: Yes, several people pointed me to this article. I don’t think it’s a hoax, it’s more of a joke: the author is making the point that with fancy statistics you can discover all sorts of patterns that don’t make sense. The implication, I believe, is that many patterns that social scientists do find through statistical analysis are not actually meaningful. I agree with this point, which could be even more pithily stated as “correlation does not imply causation.” I am irritated, however, by the singling out of multilevel models here, as the point could be mad
Introduction: For the past several months I’ve been circling around and around some questions related to the issue of how we build trust in statistical methods and statistical results. There are lots of examples but let me start with my own career. My most cited publications are my books and my methods papers, but I think that much of my credibility as a statistical researcher comes from my applied work. It somehow matters, I think, when judging my statistical work, that I’ve done (and continue to do) real research in social and environmental science. Why is this? It’s not just that my applied work gives me good examples for my textbooks. It’s also that the applied work motivated the new methods. Most of the successful theory and methods that my collaborators and I have developed, we developed in the context of trying to solve active applied problems. We weren’t trying to shave a half a point off the predictive error in the Boston housing data; rather, we were attacking new problems that we
4 0.10536436 1546 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-24-Hey—has anybody done this study yet?
Introduction: A few years ago I suggested a research project to study how Americans define themselves in terms of regional identity. For example, if you grew up in South Dakota but live in Washington, D.C., do you you call yourself a midwesterner, a westerner, a southerner, or what? The analogy is to the paper by Michael Hout on “How 4 million Irish immigrants became 40 million Irish Americans.” Contrary to expectations, it wasn’t about prolific breeding, it was about how people of mixed background choose to classify themselves.
Introduction: We were having so much fun on this thread that I couldn’t resist linking to this news item by Adrian Chen. The good news is that Scott Adams (creater of the Dilbert comic strip) “has a certified genius IQ” and that he “can open jars with [his] bare hands.” He is also “able to lift heavy objects.” Cool! In all seriousness, I knew nothing about this aspect of Adams when I wrote the earlier blog. I was just surprised (and remain surprised) that he was so impressed with Charlie Sheen for being good-looking and being able to remember his lines. At the time I thought it was just a matter of Adams being overly-influenced by his direct experience, along with some satisfaction in separating himself from the general mass of Sheen-haters out there. But now I wonder if something more is going on, that maybe he feels that he and Sheen are on the same side in a culture war. In any case, the ultimate topic of interest here is not Sheen or Adams but rather more general questions of what
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same-blog 1 0.96930194 1457 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-13-Retro ethnic slurs
Introduction: From Watership Down: There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight. Wow. OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom!), I wouldn’t see it as being in poor taste. But somehow, to this non-U.K. reader, Adams’s remark about “Irishmen” seems a bit over the top. I’m not criticizing it as offensive, exactly; it just is a bit jarring, and it’s kind of hard for me to believe someone would just write that as a throwaway line anymore. Things have changed a lot since 1971, I guess, or maybe in England an Irish joke is no more offensive/awkward than a joke about corrupt Chicagoans, loopy Californians, or crazy Floridians would be here.
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Introduction: I, like Steve Hsu , I too would love to read a definitive biography of John von Neumann (or, as we’d say in the U.S., “John Neumann”). I’ve read little things about him in various places such as Stanislaw Ulam’s classic autobiography, and two things I’ve repeatedly noticed are: 1. Neumann comes off as a obnoxious, self-satisfied jerk. He just seems like the kind of guy I wouldn’t like in real life. 2. All these great men seem to really have loved the guy. It’s hard for me to reconcile two impressions above. Of course, lots of people have a good side and a bad side, but what’s striking here is that my impressions of Neumann’s bad side come from the very stories that his friends use to demonstrate how lovable he was! So, yes, I’d like to see the biography–but only if it could resolve this paradox. Also, I don’t know how relevant this is, but Neumann shares one thing with the more-lovable Ulam and the less-lovable Mandelbrot: all had Jewish backgrounds but didn’t seem to
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Introduction: Ooooooh, I never ever thought I’d have a legitimate excuse to tell this story, and now I do! The story took place many years ago, but first I have to tell you what made me think of it: Rasmus Bååth posted the following comment last month: On airplane tickets a Swedish “å” is written as “aa” resulting in Rasmus Baaaath. Once I bought a ticket online and five minutes later a guy from Lufthansa calls me and asks if I misspelled my name… OK, now here’s my story (which is not nearly as good). A long time ago (but when I was already an adult), I was in England for some reason, and I thought I’d take a day trip from London to Bath. So here I am on line, trying to think of what to say at the ticket counter. I remember that in England, they call Bath, Bahth. So, should I ask for “a ticket to Bahth”? I’m not sure, I’m afraid that it will sound silly, like I’m trying to fake an English accent. So, when I get to the front of the line, I say, hesitantly, “I’d like a ticket to Bath?
4 0.79622853 197 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-10-The last great essayist?
Introduction: I recently read a bizarre article by Janet Malcolm on a murder trial in NYC. What threw me about the article was that the story was utterly commonplace (by the standards of today’s headlines): divorced mom kills ex-husband in a custody dispute over their four-year-old daughter. The only interesting features were (a) the wife was a doctor and the husband were a dentist, the sort of people you’d expect to sue rather than slay, and (b) the wife hired a hitman from within the insular immigrant community that she (and her husband) belonged to. But, really, neither of these was much of a twist. To add to the non-storyness of it all, there were no other suspects, the evidence against the wife and the hitman was overwhelming, and even the high-paid defense lawyers didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to convince anyone of their client’s innocents. (One of the closing arguments was that one aspect of the wife’s story was so ridiculous that it had to be true. In the lawyer’s wo
Introduction: Scott “Dilbert” Adams has met Charlie Sheen and thinks he really is a superbeing. This perhaps relates to some well-known cognitive biases. I’m not sure what this one’s called, but the idea is that Adams is probably overweighting his direct impressions: he saw Sheen-on-the-set, not Sheen-beating-his-wife. Also, everybody else hates Sheen, so Adams can distinguish himself by being tolerant, etc. I’m not sure what this latter phenomenon is called, but I’ve noticed it before. When I come into a new situation and meet some person X, who everybody says is a jerk, and then person X happens to act in a civilized way that day, then there’s a real temptation to say, Hey, X isn’t so bad after all. It makes me feel so tolerant and above-it-all. Perhaps that’s partly what’s going on with Scott Adams here: he can view himself as the objective outsider who can be impressed by Sheen, not like all those silly emotional people who get hung up on the headlines. From here, though, it just ma
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Introduction: From Watership Down: There is a rabbit saying, ‘In the warren, more stories than passages’; and a rabbit can no more refuse to tell a story than an Irishman can refuse to fight. Wow. OK, if someone made a joke about New Yorkers being argumentative or people from Iowa being boring (sorry, Tom!), I wouldn’t see it as being in poor taste. But somehow, to this non-U.K. reader, Adams’s remark about “Irishmen” seems a bit over the top. I’m not criticizing it as offensive, exactly; it just is a bit jarring, and it’s kind of hard for me to believe someone would just write that as a throwaway line anymore. Things have changed a lot since 1971, I guess, or maybe in England an Irish joke is no more offensive/awkward than a joke about corrupt Chicagoans, loopy Californians, or crazy Floridians would be here.
2 0.73894346 1546 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-24-Hey—has anybody done this study yet?
Introduction: A few years ago I suggested a research project to study how Americans define themselves in terms of regional identity. For example, if you grew up in South Dakota but live in Washington, D.C., do you you call yourself a midwesterner, a westerner, a southerner, or what? The analogy is to the paper by Michael Hout on “How 4 million Irish immigrants became 40 million Irish Americans.” Contrary to expectations, it wasn’t about prolific breeding, it was about how people of mixed background choose to classify themselves.
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Introduction: Bernard Phiri writes: I am relatively new to glm models, anyhow, I am currently using your book “Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models” (pages 109-115). I am using a Poisson GLM model to analyse an aerial census dataset of wild herbivores on a ranch in Kenya. In my analysis I have the following variables: 1. Outcome variable: count of wild herbivores sighted at a given location 2. Explanatory variable1: vegetation type i.e. type of vegetation of the grid in which animals were sighted (the ranch is divided into 1x1km grids) 3. Explanatory variable2: animal species e.g. eland, elephant, zebra etc 4. Exposure: proximity to water i.e. distance (km) to the nearest water point My questions are as follows: 1. Am I correct to include proximity to water point as an offset? I notice that in the example in your book the offset is a count, does this matter? 2. By including proximity to water in the model as an exposure am I correct to interpret th
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Introduction: Another stereotype is affirmed when I go on the U.K. rail system webpage and it repeatedly times out on me. At one point I have a browser open with the itinerary I’m interested in, and then awhile later I reopen the window (not clicking on anything on the page, just bringing the window up on the screen) but it’s timed out again. P.S. Yes, yes, I know that Amtrak is worse. Still, it’s amusing to see a confirmation that, at least in one respect, the British trains are as bad as they say.
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Introduction: I want a graph-paper-style notebook, ideally something lightweight—I’m looking to make notes, not art drawings—and not too large. I’m currently using a 17 x 22 cm notebook, which is a fine size. It also has pretty small squares, which I like. My problem with the notebook I have now is that the ink is too heavy—that is, the lines are too dark. I want very faint lines, just visible enough to be used as guides but not so heavy that to be overwhelming. The notebooks I see in the stores all have pretty dark lines. Any suggestions?
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