andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1494 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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.
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same-blog 1 1.0 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.
2 0.35352355 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 0.28567111 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
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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
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
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same-blog 1 0.97932923 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.
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 0.86811662 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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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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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
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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.
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Introduction: According to this op-ed by Louise Mozingo, the fashion for suburban corporate parks is seventy years old: In 1942 the AT&T; Bell Telephone Laboratories moved from its offices in Lower Manhattan to a new, custom-designed facility on 213 acres outside Summit, N.J. The location provided space for laboratories and quiet for acoustical research, and new features: parking lots that allowed scientists and engineers to drive from their nearby suburban homes, a spacious cafeteria and lounge and, most surprisingly, views from every window of a carefully tended pastoral landscape designed by the Olmsted brothers, sons of the designer of Central Park. Corporate management never saw the city center in the same way again. Bell Labs initiated a tide of migration of white-collar workers, especially as state and federal governments conveniently extended highways into the rural edge. Just to throw some Richard Florida in the mix: Back in 1990, I turned down a job offer from Bell Labs, larg
3 0.69344318 964 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-19-An interweaving-transformation strategy for boosting MCMC efficiency
Introduction: Yaming Yu and Xiao-Li Meng write in with a cool new idea for improving the efficiency of Gibbs and Metropolis in multilevel models: For a broad class of multilevel models, there exist two well-known competing parameterizations, the centered parameterization (CP) and the non-centered parameterization (NCP), for effective MCMC implementation. Much literature has been devoted to the questions of when to use which and how to compromise between them via partial CP/NCP. This article introduces an alternative strategy for boosting MCMC efficiency via simply interweaving—but not alternating—the two parameterizations. This strategy has the surprising property that failure of both the CP and NCP chains to converge geometrically does not prevent the interweaving algorithm from doing so. It achieves this seemingly magical property by taking advantage of the discordance of the two parameterizations, namely, the sufficiency of CP and the ancillarity of NCP, to substantially reduce the Markovian
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Introduction: I can’t use this on my PC, but the link comes from Aleks, so maybe it’s something good!
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