andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1563 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: My coblogger John Sides feeds a troll. It’s a tough call. Yesterday I gave my reasoning for ignoring these provocateurs, but in this case the troll in question is writing for a major newspaper so it makes sense for John to go to the trouble of shooting him down. Even though I suspect the columnist was trolling for no better reason than . . . he had a deadline and nothing to say so he thought he’d wade into a controversy. On the plus side, as a statistician I’m happy that statistics is considered important enough that it’s worth trolling! When they start attacking like this, they must feel a bit on the defensive. . . .
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1 Yesterday I gave my reasoning for ignoring these provocateurs, but in this case the troll in question is writing for a major newspaper so it makes sense for John to go to the trouble of shooting him down. [sent-3, score-1.599]
2 Even though I suspect the columnist was trolling for no better reason than . [sent-4, score-0.983]
3 he had a deadline and nothing to say so he thought he’d wade into a controversy. [sent-7, score-0.631]
4 On the plus side, as a statistician I’m happy that statistics is considered important enough that it’s worth trolling! [sent-8, score-0.739]
5 When they start attacking like this, they must feel a bit on the defensive. [sent-9, score-0.569]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 1563 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-05-Someone is wrong on the internet, part 2
Introduction: My coblogger John Sides feeds a troll. It’s a tough call. Yesterday I gave my reasoning for ignoring these provocateurs, but in this case the troll in question is writing for a major newspaper so it makes sense for John to go to the trouble of shooting him down. Even though I suspect the columnist was trolling for no better reason than . . . he had a deadline and nothing to say so he thought he’d wade into a controversy. On the plus side, as a statistician I’m happy that statistics is considered important enough that it’s worth trolling! When they start attacking like this, they must feel a bit on the defensive. . . .
2 0.10465066 2327 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-09-Nicholas Wade and the paradox of racism
Introduction: The paradox of racism is that at any given moment, the racism of the day seems reasonable and very possibly true, but the racism of the past always seems so ridiculous. I’ve been thinking about this for a few months ever since receiving in the mail a new book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History,” by New York Times reporter Nicholas Wade. Here’s what I wrote in my review of this book for Slate : The word “inequality” does not appear in the book’s index, but what Wade is offering is essentially a theory of economic and social inequality, explaining systematic racial differences in prosperity based on a combination of innate traits (“the disinclination to save in tribal societies is linked to a strong propensity for immediate consumption”) and genetic adaptation to political and social institutions (arguing, for example, that generations of centralized rule have effected a selection pressure for Chinese to be accepting of authority). Wade is clearly in
3 0.093375035 2269 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-27-Beyond the Valley of the Trolls
Introduction: In a further discussion of the discussion about the discussion of a paper in Administrative Science Quarterly, Thomas Basbøll writes: I [Basbøll] feel “entitled”, if that’s the right word (actually, I’d say I feel privileged), to express my opinions to anyone who wants to listen, and while I think it does say something about an author whether or not they answer a question (where what it says depends very much on the quality of the question), I don’t think the author has any obligation to me to respond immediately. If I succeed in raising doubts about something in the minds of many readers, then that’s obviously something an author should take seriously. The point is that an author has a responsibility to the readership of the paper, not any one critic. I agree that the ultimate audience is the scholarly community (and, beyond that, the general public) and that the critic is just serving as a conduit, the person who poses the Q in the Q-and-A. That said, I get frustrated frust
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Introduction: If being cantankerous and potty-mouthed is a bad thing, I’m in big trouble !
5 0.079556242 882 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-31-Meanwhile, on the sister blog . . .
Introduction: NYT columnist Douthat asks: Should we be disturbed that a leading presidential candidate endorses a pro-slavery position? Who’s on the web? And where are they? Sowell, Carlson, Barone: fools, knaves, or simply victims of a cognitive illusion? Don’t blame the American public for the D.C. deadlock Calvin College update Help reform the Institutional Review Board (IRB) system! Powerful credit-rating agencies are a creation of the government . . . what does it mean when they bite the hand that feeds them? “Waiting for a landslide” A simple theory of why Obama didn’t come out fighting in 2009 A modest proposal Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Family Research Council and the Barnard Center for Research on Women Sleazy data miners Genetic essentialism is in our genes Wow, that was a lot! No wonder I don’t get any research done…
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same-blog 1 0.96664041 1563 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-05-Someone is wrong on the internet, part 2
Introduction: My coblogger John Sides feeds a troll. It’s a tough call. Yesterday I gave my reasoning for ignoring these provocateurs, but in this case the troll in question is writing for a major newspaper so it makes sense for John to go to the trouble of shooting him down. Even though I suspect the columnist was trolling for no better reason than . . . he had a deadline and nothing to say so he thought he’d wade into a controversy. On the plus side, as a statistician I’m happy that statistics is considered important enough that it’s worth trolling! When they start attacking like this, they must feel a bit on the defensive. . . .
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
3 0.72791618 1140 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-27-Educational monoculture
Introduction: John Cook writes that he’d like to hear more people talk about “educational monoculture.” I don’t actually know John Cook but I enjoy reading his blog, so I feel like the least I can do is to honor his request. I have to admit that I have a bit of a monocultural temperament myself. I have strong feelings about the right and wrong way to do things, and I don’t have much patience for what seems to me to be the wrong way. As a result, I’ve often disparaged or ignored important statistical developments because some small aspect of the new idea didn’t fit with my thinking. (On the plus side, I think I’ve disparaged or ignored lots more bad ideas thad deserve oblivion.) I’ve always been suspicious of the hedgehog/fox distinction because my impression is that just about everybody likes to think of him or herself as a fox. Being a hedgehog is like being “ideological”; most of us like to think of ourselves as pragmatic foxes. And in any case I think most statisticians are foxes.
Introduction: Tyler Cowen discusses his and Bryan Caplan’s reaction to that notorious book by Amy Chua, the Yale law professor who boasts of screaming at her children, calling them “garbage,” not letting them go to the bathroom when they were studying piano, etc. Caplan thinks Chua is deluded (in the sense of not being aware of research showing minimal effects of parenting on children’s intelligence and personality), foolish (in writing a book and making recommendations without trying to lean about the abundant research on child-rearing), and cruel. Cowen takes a middle view in that he doesn’t subscribe to Chua’s parenting strategies but he does think that his friends’ kids will do well (and partly because of his friends’ parenting styles, not just from their genes). Do you view yourself as special? I have a somewhat different take on the matter, an idea that’s been stewing in my mind for awhile, ever since I heard about the Wall Street Journal article that started this all. My story is
5 0.71586555 139 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-10-Life in New York, Then and Now
Introduction: Interesting mini-memoir from John Podhoretz about the Upper West Side, in his words, “the most affluent shtetl the world has ever seen.” The only part I can’t quite follow is his offhand remark, “It is an expensive place to live, but then it always was.” I always thought that, before 1985 or so, the Upper West Side wasn’t so upscale. People at Columbia tell all sorts of stories about how things used to be in the bad old days. I have one other comment. Before giving it, let me emphasize that enjoyed reading Podhoretz’s article and, by making the comment below, I’m not trying to shoot Podhoretz down; rather, I’m trying to help out by pointing out a habit in his writing that might be getting in the way of his larger messages. Podhoretz writes the following about slum clearance: Over the course of the next four years, 20 houses on the block would be demolished and replaced with a high school named for Louis Brandeis and a relocated elementary school. Of the 35 brownstones t
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20 0.68334991 1442 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-03-Double standard? Plagiarizing journos get slammed, plagiarizing profs just shrug it off
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same-blog 1 0.93624687 1563 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-05-Someone is wrong on the internet, part 2
Introduction: My coblogger John Sides feeds a troll. It’s a tough call. Yesterday I gave my reasoning for ignoring these provocateurs, but in this case the troll in question is writing for a major newspaper so it makes sense for John to go to the trouble of shooting him down. Even though I suspect the columnist was trolling for no better reason than . . . he had a deadline and nothing to say so he thought he’d wade into a controversy. On the plus side, as a statistician I’m happy that statistics is considered important enough that it’s worth trolling! When they start attacking like this, they must feel a bit on the defensive. . . .
Introduction: Last year we discussed an important challenge in causal inference: The standard advice (given in many books, including ours) for causal inference is to control for relevant pre-treatment variables as much as possible. But, as Judea Pearl has pointed out, instruments (as in “instrumental variables”) are pre-treatment variables that we would not want to “control for” in a matching or regression sense. At first, this seems like a minor modification, with the new recommendation being to apply instrumental variables estimation using all pre-treatment instruments, and to control for all other pre-treatment variables. But that can’t really work as general advice. What about weak instruments or covariates that have some instrumental aspects? I asked Paul Rosenbaum for his thoughts on the matter, and he wrote the following: In section 18.2 of Design of Observational Studies (DOS), I [Rosenbaum] discuss “seemingly innocuous confounding” defined to be a covariate that predicts a su
Introduction: A few months ago we discussed Ron Unz’s claim that Jews are massively overrepresented in Ivy League college admissions, not just in comparison to the general population of college-age Americans, but even in comparison to other white kids with comparable academic ability and preparation. Most of Unz’s article concerns admissions of Asian-Americans, and he also has a proposal to admit certain students at random (see my discussion in the link above). In the present post, I concentrate on the statistics about Jewish students, because this is where I have learned that his statistics are particularly suspect, with various numbers being off by factors of 2 or 4 or more. Unz’s article was discussed, largely favorably, by academic bloggers Tyler Cowen , Steve Hsu , and . . . me! Hsu writes: “Don’t miss the statistical supplement.” But a lot of our trust in those statistics seems to be misplaced. Some people have sent me some information showing serious problems with Unz’s methods
4 0.87041235 1004 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-11-Kaiser Fung on how not to critique models
Introduction: In the context of a debate between economists Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen on the “IS-LM model” [no, I don't know what it is, either!], Kaiser writes : Since a model is an abstraction, a simplification of reality, no model is above critique. I [Kaiser] consider the following types of critique not deserving: 1) The critique that the modeler makes an assumption 2) The critique that the modeler makes an assumption for mathematical convenience 3) The critique that the model omits some feature 4) The critique that the model doesn’t fit one’s intuition 5) The critique that the model fails to make a specific prediction Above all, a serious critique must include an alternative model that is provably better than the one it criticises. It is not enough to show that the alternative solves the problems being pointed out; the alternative must do so while preserving the useful aspects of the model being criticized. I have mixed feelings about Kaiser’s rules. On one hand, I agree wit
5 0.86596179 2073 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-22-Ivy Jew update
Introduction: Nurit Baytch posted a document, A Critique of Ron Unz’s Article “The Myth of American Meritocracy” , that is relevant to an ongoing discussion we had on this blog. Baytch’s article begins: In “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” Ron Unz, the publisher of The American Conservative, claimed that Harvard discriminates against non-Jewish white and Asian students in favor of Jewish students. I [Baytch] shall demonstrate that Unz’s conclusion that Jews are over-admitted to Harvard was erroneous, as he relied on faulty assumptions and spurious data: Unz substantially overestimated the percentage of Jews at Harvard while grossly underestimating the percentage of Jews among high academic achievers, when, in fact, there is no discrepancy, as my analysis will show. In addition, Unz’s arguments have proven to be untenable in light of a recent survey of incoming Harvard freshmen conducted by The Harvard Crimson, which found that students who identified as Jewish reported a mean SAT score of 2289
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