andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1555 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I’m sorry I don’t have any new zombie papers in time for Halloween. Instead I’d like to be a little monster by reproducing a mini-rant from this article on experimental reasoning in social science: I will restrict my discussion to social science examples. Social scientists are often tempted to illustrate their ideas with examples from medical research. When it comes to medicine, though, we are, with rare exceptions, at best ignorant laypersons (in my case, not even reaching that level), and it is my impression that by reaching for medical analogies we are implicitly trying to borrow some of the scientific and cultural authority of that field for our own purposes. Evidence-based medicine is the subject of a large literature of its own (see, for example, Lau, Ioannidis, and Schmid, 1998).
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Introduction: I’m sorry I don’t have any new zombie papers in time for Halloween. Instead I’d like to be a little monster by reproducing a mini-rant from this article on experimental reasoning in social science: I will restrict my discussion to social science examples. Social scientists are often tempted to illustrate their ideas with examples from medical research. When it comes to medicine, though, we are, with rare exceptions, at best ignorant laypersons (in my case, not even reaching that level), and it is my impression that by reaching for medical analogies we are implicitly trying to borrow some of the scientific and cultural authority of that field for our own purposes. Evidence-based medicine is the subject of a large literature of its own (see, for example, Lau, Ioannidis, and Schmid, 1998).
2 0.12483335 1138 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-25-Chris Schmid on Evidence Based Medicine
Introduction: Chris Schmid is a statistician at New England Medical Center who is an expert on evidence-based medicine. I invited him to present an introductory overview lecture on the topic at last year’s Joint Statistical Meetings, and here are his slides . All 123 of them. I don’t know how he expected to go though all of these in an hour. You could teach a semester-long course based on this material. Good stuff, I recommend you all read it.
3 0.10939564 114 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-28-More on Bayesian deduction-induction
Introduction: Kevin Bryan wrote: I read your new article on deduction/induction under Bayes. There are a couple interesting papers from economic decision theory which are related that you might find interesting. Samuelson et al have a (very) recent paper about what happens when you have some Bayesian and some non-Bayesian hypotheses. (I mentioned this one on my blog earlier this year.) Essentially, the Bayesian hypotheses are forced to “make predictions” in every future period (“if the unemployment rate is x%, the president is reelected with pr=x), whereas other forms of reasoning (say, analogies: “If the unemployment rate is above 10%, the president will not be reelected”). Imagine you have some prior over, say, the economy and elections, with 99.9% of the hypotheses being Bayesian and the rest being analogies as above. Then 100 years from now, because the analogies are so hard to refute, using deduction will push the proportion of Bayesian hypotheses toward zero. There is a
4 0.10509766 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
5 0.10468589 1630 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-18-Postdoc positions at Microsoft Research – NYC
Introduction: Sharad Goel sends this in: Microsoft Research NYC [ http://research.microsoft.com/newyork/ ] seeks outstanding applicants for 2-year postdoctoral researcher positions. We welcome applicants with a strong academic record in one of the following areas: * Computational social science: http://research.microsoft.com/cssnyc * Online experimental social science: http://research.microsoft.com/oess_nyc * Algorithmic economics and market design: http://research.microsoft.com/algorithmic-economics/ * Machine learning: http://research.microsoft.com/mlnyc/ We will also consider applicants in other focus areas of the lab, including information retrieval, and behavioral & empirical economics. Additional information about these areas is included below. Please submit all application materials by January 11, 2013. ———- COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE http://research.microsoft.com/cssnyc With an increasing amount of data on every aspect of our daily activities — from what we buy, to wh
6 0.094948605 723 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-21-Literary blurb translation guide
7 0.094445616 1833 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-30-“Tragedy of the science-communication commons”
8 0.088755526 202 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-12-Job openings in multilevel modeling in Bristol, England
12 0.082560979 785 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-02-Experimental reasoning in social science
13 0.081611738 1878 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-31-How to fix the tabloids? Toward replicable social science research
14 0.081432611 2040 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-26-Difficulties in making inferences about scientific truth from distributions of published p-values
15 0.080555886 1139 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-26-Suggested resolution of the Bem paradox
16 0.079899289 1002 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-10-“Venetia Orcutt, GWU med school professor, quits after complaints of no-show class”
17 0.078986347 2131 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-12-My talk at Leuven, Sat 14 Dec
18 0.077520132 1321 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-15-A statistical research project: Weeding out the fraudulent citations
19 0.076834969 1335 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-21-Responding to a bizarre anti-social-science screed
20 0.075615816 463 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-11-Compare p-values from privately funded medical trials to those in publicly funded research?
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Introduction: I’m sorry I don’t have any new zombie papers in time for Halloween. Instead I’d like to be a little monster by reproducing a mini-rant from this article on experimental reasoning in social science: I will restrict my discussion to social science examples. Social scientists are often tempted to illustrate their ideas with examples from medical research. When it comes to medicine, though, we are, with rare exceptions, at best ignorant laypersons (in my case, not even reaching that level), and it is my impression that by reaching for medical analogies we are implicitly trying to borrow some of the scientific and cultural authority of that field for our own purposes. Evidence-based medicine is the subject of a large literature of its own (see, for example, Lau, Ioannidis, and Schmid, 1998).
2 0.8660863 1833 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-30-“Tragedy of the science-communication commons”
Introduction: I’ve earlier written that science is science communication —that is, the act of communicating scientific ideas and findings to ourselves and others is itself a central part of science. My point was to push against a conventional separation between the act of science and the act of communication, the idea that science is done by scientists and communication is done by communicators. It’s a rare bit of science that does not include communication as part of it. As a scientist and science communicator myself, I’m particularly sensitive to devaluing of communication. (For example, Bayesian Data Analysis is full of original research that was done in order to communicate; or, to put it another way, we often think we understand a scientific idea, but once we try to communicate it, we recognize gaps in our understanding that motivate further research.) I once saw the following on one of those inspirational-sayings-for-every-day desk calendars: “To have ideas is to gather flowers. To thin
Introduction: The other day, Nicholas Christakis wrote an article in the newspaper criticizing academic social science departments: The social sciences have stagnated. . . . This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. . . . I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomena does not help us fix them. I disagreed , saying that Christakis wasn’t giving social science research enough credit: I’m no economist so I can let others discuss the bit about “monopoly power is bad for markets.” I assume that the study by
4 0.79028893 1335 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-21-Responding to a bizarre anti-social-science screed
Introduction: Philosophy professor Gary Gutting writes : Public policy debates often involve appeals to results of work in social sciences like economics and sociology. . . . How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions? . . . The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive. . . . But how reliable is even the best work on the effects of teaching? How, for example, does it compare with the best work by biochemists on the effects of light on plant growth? Since humans are much more complex than plants and biochemists have far more refined techniques for studying plants, we may well expect the biochemical work to be far more reliable. . . . While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not. OK, fine. But then comes the punchline: Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social scienc
5 0.77776432 1949 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-21-Defensive political science responds defensively to an attack on social science
Introduction: Nicholas Christakis, a medical scientist perhaps best known for his controversial claim (see also here ), based on joint work with James Fowler, that obesity is contagious, writes : The social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. . . . I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomen
6 0.76849669 2361 andrew gelman stats-2014-06-06-Hurricanes vs. Himmicanes
7 0.76224184 756 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-10-Christakis-Fowler update
8 0.75820208 785 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-02-Experimental reasoning in social science
9 0.73288858 1878 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-31-How to fix the tabloids? Toward replicable social science research
11 0.71488851 2215 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-17-The Washington Post reprints university press releases without editing them
12 0.71483588 1947 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-20-We are what we are studying
13 0.71205211 1630 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-18-Postdoc positions at Microsoft Research – NYC
15 0.71046126 483 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-23-Science, ideology, and human origins
17 0.70761359 877 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-29-Applying quantum probability to political science
18 0.70400065 2185 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-25-Xihong Lin on sparsity and density
19 0.70259345 2278 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-01-Association for Psychological Science announces a new journal
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1 0.98554909 1589 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-25-Life as a blogger: the emails just get weirder and weirder
Introduction: In the email the other day, subject line “Casting blogger, writer, journalist to host cable series”: Hi there Andrew, I’m casting a male journalist, writer, blogger, documentary filmmaker or comedian with a certain type personality for a television pilot along with production company, Pipeline39. See below: A certain type of character – no cockiness, no ego, a person who is smart, savvy, dry humor, but someone who isn’t imposing, who can infiltrate these organizations. This person will be hosting his own show and covering alternative lifestyles and secret societies around the world. If you’re interested in hearing more or would like to be considered for this project, please email me a photo and a bio of yourself, along with contact information. I’ll respond to you ASAP. I’m looking forward to hearing from you. *** Casting Producer (646) ***.**** ***@gmail.com I was with them until I got to the “no ego” part. . . . Also, I don’t think I could infiltrate any org
2 0.95780379 1856 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-14-GPstuff: Bayesian Modeling with Gaussian Processes
Introduction: I think it’s part of my duty as a blogger to intersperse, along with the steady flow of jokes, rants, and literary criticism, some material that will actually be useful to you. So here goes. Jarno Vanhatalo, Jaakko Riihimäki, Jouni Hartikainen, Pasi Jylänki, Ville Tolvanen, and Aki Vehtari write : The GPstuff toolbox is a versatile collection of Gaussian process models and computational tools required for Bayesian inference. The tools include, among others, various inference methods, sparse approximations and model assessment methods. We can actually now fit Gaussian processes in Stan . But for big problems (or even moderately-sized problems), full Bayes can be slow. GPstuff uses EP, which is faster. At some point we’d like to implement EP in Stan. (Right now we’re working with Dave Blei to implement VB.) GPstuff really works. I saw Aki use it to fit a nonparametric version of the Bangladesh well-switching example in ARM. He was sitting in his office and just whip
Introduction: Tapen Sinha writes: Living in Mexico, I have been witness to many strange (and beautiful) things. Perhaps the strangest happened during the first outbreak of A(H1N1) in Mexico City. We had our university closed, football (soccer) was played in empty stadiums (or should it be stadia) because the government feared a spread of the virus. The Metro was operating and so were the private/public buses and taxis. Since the university was closed, we took the opportunity to collect data on facemask use in the public transport systems. It was a simple (but potentially deadly!) exercise in first hand statistical data collection that we teach our students (Although I must admit that I did not dare sending my research assistant to collect data – what if she contracted the virus?). I believe it was a unique experiment never to be repeated. The paper appeared in the journal Health Policy. From the abstract: At the height of the influenza epidemic in Mexico City in the spring of 2009, the f
4 0.93145812 1677 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-16-Greenland is one tough town
Introduction: Americans (including me) don’t know much about other countries. Jeff Lax sent me to this blog post by Myrddin pointing out that Belgium has a higher murder rate than the rest of Western Europe. I have no particular take on this, but it’s a good reminder that other countries differ from each other. Here in the U.S., we tend to think all western European countries are the same, all eastern European countries are the same, etc. In reality, Sweden is not Finland . P.S. According to the Wiki , Greenland is one tough town. I guess there’s nothing much to do out there but watch satellite TV, chew the blubber, and kill people.
5 0.92134053 1468 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-24-Multilevel modeling and instrumental variables
Introduction: Terence Teo writes: I was wondering if multilevel models can be used as an alternative to 2SLS or IV models to deal with (i) endogeneity and (ii) selection problems. More concretely, I am trying to assess the impact of investment treaties on foreign investment. Aside from the fact that foreign investment is correlated over time, it may be the case that countries that already receive sufficient amounts of foreign investment need not sign treaties, and countries that sign treaties are those that need foreign investment in the first place. Countries thus “select” into treatment; treaty signing is non-random. As such, I argue that to properly estimate the impact of treaties on investment, we must model the determinants of treaty signing. I [Teo] am currently modeling this as two separate models: (1) regress predictors on likelihood of treaty signing, (2) regress treaty (with interactions, etc) on investment (I’ve thought of using propensity score matching for this part of the model)
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