andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1561 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: I made the mistake of googling myself (I know, I know . . .) and came across a couple of rude bloggers criticizing something I’d written. I don’t mind criticism, and lord knows I can be a rude blogger myself at times, but these criticisms were really bad, a mix of already-refuted arguments and new claims that were just flat-out ridiculous. Really bad stuff. I then spent about an hour, on and off, writing a long long post explaining why they were wrong and how they could make their arguments better. But then, before I hit Send, I realized it would a mistake to post my response. Getting into a fight with these people whom I’d never heard of before . . . what’s the point? If they want to comment on my blog, I will respond (within reason), or if they are well known researchers or journalists, it’s perhaps worth correcting them. Or if they made an interesting argument, sure. But there’s no point in scouring the web looking for bad arguments to refute. That way lies madness. I w
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 I made the mistake of googling myself (I know, I know . [sent-1, score-0.513]
2 ) and came across a couple of rude bloggers criticizing something I’d written. [sent-4, score-0.48]
3 I don’t mind criticism, and lord knows I can be a rude blogger myself at times, but these criticisms were really bad, a mix of already-refuted arguments and new claims that were just flat-out ridiculous. [sent-5, score-1.139]
4 I then spent about an hour, on and off, writing a long long post explaining why they were wrong and how they could make their arguments better. [sent-7, score-0.971]
5 But then, before I hit Send, I realized it would a mistake to post my response. [sent-8, score-0.652]
6 Getting into a fight with these people whom I’d never heard of before . [sent-9, score-0.193]
7 If they want to comment on my blog, I will respond (within reason), or if they are well known researchers or journalists, it’s perhaps worth correcting them. [sent-13, score-0.218]
8 But there’s no point in scouring the web looking for bad arguments to refute. [sent-15, score-0.681]
9 I was then reminded of the famous line about someone being wrong on the internet. [sent-17, score-0.283]
10 Get a good layout and some good fonts, and you look as authoritative as any other site. [sent-20, score-0.411]
11 In writing my pointless refutation, I realized something I hadn’t thought of before. [sent-26, score-0.436]
12 Which I will blog (or incorporate into a paper) sometime. [sent-27, score-0.2]
13 In the meantime, I’ll have to stop googling myself. [sent-28, score-0.345]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('rude', 0.261), ('googling', 0.257), ('arguments', 0.256), ('hour', 0.204), ('realized', 0.198), ('hit', 0.197), ('scouring', 0.18), ('mistake', 0.164), ('layout', 0.162), ('bad', 0.159), ('lord', 0.156), ('fonts', 0.156), ('authoritative', 0.156), ('refutation', 0.148), ('lies', 0.13), ('pointless', 0.13), ('correcting', 0.13), ('suddenly', 0.12), ('incorporate', 0.12), ('bloggers', 0.117), ('fight', 0.117), ('wrong', 0.111), ('blogger', 0.111), ('meantime', 0.11), ('long', 0.108), ('writing', 0.108), ('hadn', 0.106), ('criticizing', 0.102), ('journalists', 0.101), ('blogs', 0.101), ('explaining', 0.1), ('criticisms', 0.097), ('somehow', 0.095), ('mix', 0.094), ('look', 0.093), ('post', 0.093), ('made', 0.092), ('reminded', 0.09), ('respond', 0.088), ('stop', 0.088), ('spent', 0.087), ('web', 0.086), ('famous', 0.082), ('knows', 0.082), ('send', 0.082), ('mind', 0.082), ('criticism', 0.08), ('blog', 0.08), ('wasn', 0.077), ('heard', 0.076)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999988 1561 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-04-Someone is wrong on the internet
Introduction: I made the mistake of googling myself (I know, I know . . .) and came across a couple of rude bloggers criticizing something I’d written. I don’t mind criticism, and lord knows I can be a rude blogger myself at times, but these criticisms were really bad, a mix of already-refuted arguments and new claims that were just flat-out ridiculous. Really bad stuff. I then spent about an hour, on and off, writing a long long post explaining why they were wrong and how they could make their arguments better. But then, before I hit Send, I realized it would a mistake to post my response. Getting into a fight with these people whom I’d never heard of before . . . what’s the point? If they want to comment on my blog, I will respond (within reason), or if they are well known researchers or journalists, it’s perhaps worth correcting them. Or if they made an interesting argument, sure. But there’s no point in scouring the web looking for bad arguments to refute. That way lies madness. I w
2 0.13447437 2279 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-02-Am I too negative?
Introduction: For background, you can start by reading my recent article, Is It Possible to Be an Ethicist Without Being Mean to People? and then a blog post, Quality over Quantity , by John Cook, who writes: At one point [Ed] Tufte spoke more generally and more personally about pursuing quality over quantity. He said most papers are not worth reading and that he learned early on to concentrate on the great papers, maybe one in 500, that are worth reading and rereading rather than trying to “keep up with the literature.” He also explained how over time he has concentrated more on showcasing excellent work than on criticizing bad work. You can see this in the progression from his first book to his latest. (Criticizing bad work is important too, but you’ll have to read his early books to find more of that. He won’t spend as much time talking about it in his course.) That reminded me of Jesse Robbins’ line: “Don’t fight stupid. You are better than that. Make more awesome.” This made me stop an
Introduction: I had a brief email exchange with Jeff Leek regarding our recent discussions of replication, criticism, and the self-correcting process of science. Jeff writes: (1) I can see the problem with serious, evidence-based criticisms not being published in the same journal (and linked to) studies that are shown to be incorrect. I have been mostly seeing these sorts of things show up in blogs. But I’m not sure that is a bad thing. I think people read blogs more than they read the literature. I wonder if this means that blogs will eventually be a sort of “shadow literature”? (2) I think there is a ton of bad literature out there, just like there is a ton of bad stuff on Google. If we focus too much on the bad stuff we will be paralyzed. I still manage to find good papers despite all the bad papers. (3) I think one positive solution to this problem is to incentivize/publish referee reports and give people credit for a good referee report just like they get credit for a good paper. T
4 0.10320045 765 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-14-How the ignorant idiots win, explained. Maybe.
Introduction: According to a New York Times article , cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have a new theory about rational argument: humans didn’t develop it in order to learn about the world, we developed it in order to win arguments with other people. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Based on the NYT article, it seems that Mercier and Sperber are basically flipping around the traditional argument, which is that humans learned to reason about the world, albeit imperfectly, and learned to use language to convey that reasoning to others. These guys would suggest that it’s the other way around: we learned to argue with others, and this has gradually led to the ability to actually make (and recognize) sound arguments, but only indirectly. The article says “”At least in some cultural contexts, this results in a kind of arms race towards greater sophistication in the production and evaluation o
5 0.09761478 2232 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-03-What is the appropriate time scale for blogging—the day or the week?
Introduction: I post (approximately) once a day and don’t plan to change that. I have enough material to post more often—for example, I could intersperse existing blog posts with summaries of my published papers or of other work that I like; and, beyond this, we currently have a one-to-two-month backlog of posts—but I’m afraid that if the number of posts were doubled, the attention given to each would be roughly halved. Looking at it the other way, I certainly don’t want to reduce my level of posting. Sure, it takes time to blog, but these are things that are important for me to say. If I were to blog less frequently, it would only be because I was pouring all these words into a different vessel, for example a book. For now, though, I think it makes sense to blog and then collect the words later as appropriate. With blogging I get comments, and many of these comments are helpful—either directly (by pointing out errors in my thinking or linking to relevant software or literature) or indirec
6 0.096719831 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
7 0.096208185 1832 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The blogroll
8 0.096107729 868 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-24-Blogs vs. real journalism
9 0.092178755 1588 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-23-No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man
10 0.086736806 1508 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-23-Speaking frankly
11 0.08612334 671 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-20-One more time-use graph
12 0.085720211 2018 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-12-Do you ever have that I-just-fit-a-model feeling?
14 0.082931466 390 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-02-Fragment of statistical autobiography
15 0.082310654 1889 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-08-Using trends in R-squared to measure progress in criminology??
16 0.080539592 523 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-18-Spam is out of control
17 0.077466398 120 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-30-You can’t put Pandora back in the box
18 0.077210069 1347 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-27-Macromuddle
19 0.07541392 2244 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-11-What if I were to stop publishing in journals?
20 0.075330026 809 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-19-“One of the easiest ways to differentiate an economist from almost anyone else in society”
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.152), (1, -0.094), (2, -0.048), (3, 0.027), (4, -0.006), (5, -0.038), (6, 0.078), (7, -0.038), (8, 0.03), (9, -0.037), (10, 0.019), (11, 0.007), (12, 0.021), (13, 0.02), (14, -0.02), (15, 0.041), (16, -0.034), (17, -0.004), (18, -0.008), (19, 0.026), (20, 0.023), (21, -0.028), (22, -0.006), (23, 0.018), (24, 0.012), (25, 0.001), (26, 0.005), (27, 0.003), (28, -0.015), (29, 0.013), (30, 0.013), (31, -0.003), (32, -0.002), (33, -0.034), (34, 0.011), (35, 0.008), (36, 0.007), (37, 0.019), (38, 0.005), (39, -0.029), (40, 0.008), (41, -0.019), (42, 0.017), (43, -0.052), (44, 0.021), (45, 0.016), (46, 0.0), (47, 0.014), (48, -0.019), (49, -0.021)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.98798078 1561 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-04-Someone is wrong on the internet
Introduction: I made the mistake of googling myself (I know, I know . . .) and came across a couple of rude bloggers criticizing something I’d written. I don’t mind criticism, and lord knows I can be a rude blogger myself at times, but these criticisms were really bad, a mix of already-refuted arguments and new claims that were just flat-out ridiculous. Really bad stuff. I then spent about an hour, on and off, writing a long long post explaining why they were wrong and how they could make their arguments better. But then, before I hit Send, I realized it would a mistake to post my response. Getting into a fight with these people whom I’d never heard of before . . . what’s the point? If they want to comment on my blog, I will respond (within reason), or if they are well known researchers or journalists, it’s perhaps worth correcting them. Or if they made an interesting argument, sure. But there’s no point in scouring the web looking for bad arguments to refute. That way lies madness. I w
2 0.85891265 868 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-24-Blogs vs. real journalism
Introduction: I was thinking a bit more about Jonathan Rauch’s lament about the fading of the buggy-whip industry print journalism, in which he mocks bloggers, analogizes blogging to scribbling with spray paint on the side of a building, and writes that the blogosphere is “the single worst medium for sustained, and therefore grown-up, reading and writing and argumentation ever invented.” Yup. Worse than talk radio. Worse than cave painting. Worse than smoke signals, rock ‘n’ roll lyrics, woodcuts, spray-paint graffiti, and every other medium of communication ever invented. OK, he didn’t really mean it. Rauch actually has an ironclad argument here. He’s claiming, in a blog, that blogging is crap. Therefore, if he fills his blog with unsupported exaggerations, that’s fine, as he’s demonstrating that blogging is . . . crap. Not to pile on, but, hey, why not? I was curious what Rauch has blogged on lately, so I googled Jonathan Rauch blog and ended up at this site , which most recently
3 0.83545816 103 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-22-Beach reads, Proust, and income tax
Introduction: The commenting feature doesn’t work for me on Helen DeWitt’s blog so I’m forced to comment on her entries here. 1. She discusses whether it’s fair to characterize The Last Samurai . I have a slightly different perspective on this: I’ve never really understood the idea that a “beach read” should be something light and fluffy. On the beach, you can relax, you have the time to get into anything. I could see wanting something light on the subway–you have to be able to get into it right away and follow it amid all the jostles. I guess the point is that when you’re at the beach, you’re far from the library. So what you really want for the beach is not necessarily something relaxing or easy to read, but rather a sure thing , a known quantity that you’ll definitely enjoy. No point sitting on the beach reading a book that you hate. 2. In an interesting discussion of translation, DeWitt recommends learning a language by reading great literature in the original tongue. Seems f
4 0.82741416 189 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-06-Proposal for a moratorium on the use of the words “fashionable” and “trendy”
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to an interesting article by Terry Teachout on David Mamet’s political conservatism. I don’t think of playwrights as gurus, but I do find it interesting to consider the political orientations of authors and celebrities . I have only one problem with Teachout’s thought-provoking article. He writes: As early as 2002 . . . Arguing that “the Western press [had] embraced antisemitism as the new black,” Mamet drew a sharp contrast between that trendy distaste for Jews and the harsh realities of daily life in Israel . . . In 2006, Mamet published a collection of essays called The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Jewish Self-Hatred and the Jews that made the point even more bluntly. “The Jewish State,” he wrote, “has offered the Arab world peace since 1948; it has received war, and slaughter, and the rhetoric of annihilation.” He went on to argue that secularized Jews who “reject their birthright of ‘connection to the Divine’” succumb in time to a self-hatred tha
5 0.82436711 1084 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-26-Tweeting the Hits?
Introduction: Someone sent me an email saying that he liked my little essay, “Descriptive statistics aren’t just for losers.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but it sounded like the kind of thing I’d say, so I searched the blog and found this post , which indeed I really like! I thanked my correspondent for reminding me of this little article I’d forgotten, and he told me he just learned of it via someone’s tweet. This made me think: Maybe I should have a twitter feed of nothing but old blog entries. I could just go back to 2004 and then go gradually forward, tweeting the items that I judge to remain of interest. Does this make sense? Or is there a better way to do this? ALternatively, I could do it as a separate blog, but that seems a bit . . . recursive.
6 0.82211959 865 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-22-Blogging is “destroying the business model for quality”?
7 0.81569117 1964 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-01-Non-topical blogging
8 0.81263006 2232 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-03-What is the appropriate time scale for blogging—the day or the week?
9 0.80979711 640 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-31-Why Edit Wikipedia?
10 0.80429548 204 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-12-Sloppily-written slam on moderately celebrated writers is amusing nonetheless
11 0.80335462 458 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-08-Blogging: Is it “fair use”?
12 0.80026412 1796 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-09-The guy behind me on line for the train . . .
13 0.79769474 1832 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The blogroll
14 0.79573774 1225 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-22-Procrastination as a positive productivity strategy
15 0.79487383 1508 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-23-Speaking frankly
16 0.79471755 532 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-23-My Wall Street Journal story
18 0.79047185 104 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-22-Seeking balance
19 0.78675878 2123 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-04-Tesla fires!
20 0.78550851 1031 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-27-Richard Stallman and John McCarthy
topicId topicWeight
[(15, 0.034), (21, 0.011), (24, 0.113), (30, 0.015), (65, 0.062), (76, 0.015), (77, 0.265), (86, 0.013), (98, 0.029), (99, 0.345)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.9519037 911 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-15-More data tools worth using from Google
Introduction: Speaking of open data and google tools, see this post from Revolution R: How to use a Google Spreadsheet as data in R .
2 0.94318235 1784 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-01-Wolfram on Mandelbrot
Introduction: The most perfect pairing of author and subject since Nicholson Baker and John Updike. Here’s Wolfram on the great researcher of fractals : In his way, Mandelbrot paid me some great compliments. When I was in my 20s, and he in his 60s, he would ask about my scientific work: “How can so many people take someone so young so seriously?” In 2002, my book “A New Kind of Science”—in which I argued that many phenomena across science are the complex results of relatively simple, program-like rules—appeared. Mandelbrot seemed to see it as a direct threat, once declaring that “Wolfram’s ‘science’ is not new except when it is clearly wrong; it deserves to be completely disregarded.” In private, though, several mutual friends told me, he fretted that in the long view of history it would overwhelm his work. In retrospect, I don’t think Mandelbrot had much to worry about on this account. The link from the above review came from Peter Woit, who also points to a review by Brian Hayes wit
Introduction: One thing we do here at the Applied Statistics Center is hold mini-conferences. The next one looks really cool. It’s organized by Sharad Goel and Jake Hofman (Microsoft Research, formerly at Yahoo Research), David Park (Columbia University), and Sergei Vassilvitskii (Google). As with our other conferences, one of our goals is to mix the academic and nonacademic research communities. Here’s the website for the workshop, and here’s the announcement from the organizers: With an explosion of data on every aspect of our everyday existence — from what we buy, to where we travel, to who we know — we are able to observe human behavior with granularity largely thought impossible just a decade ago. The growth of such online activity has further facilitated the design of web-based experiments, enhancing both the scale and efficiency of traditional methods. Together these advances have created an unprecedented opportunity to address longstanding questions in the social sciences, rang
4 0.93270385 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
5 0.93156111 1124 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-17-How to map geographically-detailed survey responses?
Introduction: David Sparks writes: I am experimenting with the mapping/visualization of survey response data, with a particular focus on using transparency to convey uncertainty. See some examples here . Do you think the examples are successful at communicating both local values of the variable of interest, as well as the lack of information in certain places? Also, do you have any general advice for choosing an approach to spatially smoothing the data in a way that preserves local features, but prevents individual respondents from standing out? I have experimented a lot with smoothing in these maps, and the cost of preventing the Midwest and West from looking “spotty” is the oversmoothing of the Northeast. My quick impression is that the graphs are more pretty than they are informative. But “pretty” is not such a bad thing! The conveying-information part is more difficult: to me, the graphs seem to be displaying a somewhat confusing mix of opinion level and population density. Consider
6 0.92966115 1684 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-20-Ugly ugly ugly
same-blog 8 0.92067385 1561 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-04-Someone is wrong on the internet
9 0.92034882 57 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-29-Roth and Amsterdam
10 0.90929317 1604 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-04-An epithet I can live with
11 0.8972733 1071 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-19-“NYU Professor Claims He Was Fired for Giving James Franco a D”
12 0.88405418 2059 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-12-Visualization, “big data”, and EDA
13 0.88139814 230 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-24-Kaggle forcasting update
14 0.88037097 93 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-17-My proposal for making college admissions fairer
15 0.87746048 2054 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-07-Bing is preferred to Google by people who aren’t like me
16 0.87149459 380 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-29-“Bluntly put . . .”
17 0.87010741 562 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-06-Statistician cracks Toronto lottery
18 0.86463898 128 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-05-The greatest works of statistics never published
19 0.86123329 216 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-18-More forecasting competitions
20 0.86056179 1948 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-21-Bayes related