andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1597 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Robin Hanson writes on paid expert consulting (of the sort that I do sometime, and is common among economists and statisticians). Hanson agrees with Keith Yost, who says: Fellow consultants and associates . . . [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it. On the other side is Steven Levitt, who Hanson quotes as saying: My own experience has been that even though I know nothing about an industry, if you give me a week, and you get a bunch of really smart people to explain the industry to me, and to tell me what they do, a lot of times what I’ve learned in economics, what I’ve learned in other places can actually be really helpful in changing the way that they see the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly given my Bayesian attitudes and my preference for continuity , I’m inclined to split the d
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Robin Hanson writes on paid expert consulting (of the sort that I do sometime, and is common among economists and statisticians). [sent-1, score-0.623]
2 Hanson agrees with Keith Yost, who says: Fellow consultants and associates . [sent-2, score-0.38]
3 [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it. [sent-5, score-0.619]
4 Perhaps unsurprisingly given my Bayesian attitudes and my preference for continuity , I’m inclined to split the difference, along the lines of two other people quoted by Hanson. [sent-7, score-0.148]
5 they bring advice to a firm that doesn’t otherwise have it. [sent-11, score-0.073]
6 The second thing that they provide is legitimacy . [sent-15, score-0.155]
7 you hire the consultants to confirm what you already thought. [sent-18, score-0.406]
8 Similarly, Nick Bloom says: There are really two types of consulting. [sent-19, score-0.101]
9 There’s operational consulting, you know, down on the factory floor . [sent-20, score-0.233]
10 those guys are very much like seasoned, gnarly, ex-manufacturing managers that have spent twenty years working in Ford and are real experts, and are now getting paid as consultants to hand out advice. [sent-23, score-0.639]
11 I’ve done some consulting of the “operational” sort, where I provide advice so that people can better solve their problems. [sent-30, score-0.674]
12 Other times I’ve been paid to give a short course on Bayesian statistics or multilevel modeling (I’ve done that at Procter & Gamble, Merck, and Google), and I hope it will be useful to the people there, but I really have no idea. [sent-31, score-0.569]
13 Still other times I’ve been paid to do really easy stuff—I’m thinking here of some legal consulting involving simple random sampling of documents from files. [sent-32, score-0.806]
14 Really anyone could’ve done that; on the other hand I know enough not to get distracted from the main goal in such problems. [sent-33, score-0.147]
15 This was in 2000 when someone from the exit-poll consortium called me and asked if I wanted to consult for them. [sent-35, score-0.215]
16 I was expecting that I’d sit quietly for a few hours listening to everything and then I’d have the chance to give my suggestions. [sent-38, score-0.213]
17 I told them about multilevel regression and poststratification and how great it was, also I gave some suggestions about improving the exit polls. [sent-41, score-0.146]
18 There have also been lots of consulting meetings that have gone nowhere, sometimes (annoyingly) after I’ve been assured I’d be paid. [sent-52, score-0.454]
19 But usually I think they really want my expertise. [sent-53, score-0.101]
20 Maybe things are different when companies hire McKinsey-type consultants, rather than hiring a statistician or economist directly. [sent-56, score-0.107]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('consulting', 0.454), ('consultants', 0.299), ('hanson', 0.212), ('yost', 0.188), ('paid', 0.169), ('operational', 0.162), ('percent', 0.117), ('ve', 0.116), ('industry', 0.108), ('hire', 0.107), ('twenty', 0.105), ('really', 0.101), ('said', 0.097), ('annoyingly', 0.086), ('nodding', 0.086), ('ceos', 0.086), ('legitimacy', 0.086), ('procter', 0.086), ('times', 0.082), ('consortium', 0.081), ('associates', 0.081), ('resistance', 0.081), ('seasoned', 0.081), ('learned', 0.079), ('done', 0.078), ('continuity', 0.077), ('gamble', 0.077), ('objection', 0.077), ('quietly', 0.077), ('bloom', 0.075), ('exit', 0.075), ('advice', 0.073), ('rubber', 0.072), ('multilevel', 0.071), ('unsurprisingly', 0.071), ('factory', 0.071), ('divides', 0.071), ('provide', 0.069), ('distracted', 0.069), ('give', 0.068), ('consult', 0.068), ('listening', 0.068), ('wanted', 0.066), ('managers', 0.066), ('nowhere', 0.066), ('ford', 0.065), ('keith', 0.065), ('rick', 0.065), ('stamp', 0.065), ('robin', 0.065)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0 1597 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-29-What is expected of a consultant
Introduction: Robin Hanson writes on paid expert consulting (of the sort that I do sometime, and is common among economists and statisticians). Hanson agrees with Keith Yost, who says: Fellow consultants and associates . . . [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it. On the other side is Steven Levitt, who Hanson quotes as saying: My own experience has been that even though I know nothing about an industry, if you give me a week, and you get a bunch of really smart people to explain the industry to me, and to tell me what they do, a lot of times what I’ve learned in economics, what I’ve learned in other places can actually be really helpful in changing the way that they see the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly given my Bayesian attitudes and my preference for continuity , I’m inclined to split the d
2 0.25376984 1596 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-29-More consulting experiences, this time in computational linguistics
Introduction: Bob wrote this long comment that I think is worth posting: I [Bob] have done a fair bit of consulting for my small natural language processing company over the past ten years. Like statistics, natural language processing is something may companies think they want, but have no idea how to do themselves. We almost always handed out “free” consulting. Usually on the phone to people who called us out of the blue. Our blog and tutorials Google ranking was pretty much our only approach to marketing other than occassionally going to business-oriented conferences. Our goal was to sell software licenses (because consulting doesn’t scale nor does it provide continuing royalty income), but since so few people knew how to use toolkits like ours, we had to help them along the way. We even provided “free” consulting with our startup license package. We were brutally honest with customers, both about our goals and their goals. Their goals were often incompatible with ours (use company X’
3 0.1969218 395 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-05-Consulting: how do you figure out what to charge?
Introduction: I’m a physicist by training, statistical data analyst by trade. Although some of my work is pretty standard statistical analysis, more often I work somewhere in a gray area that includes physics, engineering, and statistics. I have very little formal statistics training but I do study in an academic-like way to learn techniques from the literature when I need to. I do some things well but there are big gaps in my stats knowledge compared to anyone who has gone to grad school in statistics. On the other hand, there are big gaps in most statisticians’ physics and engineering knowledge compared to anyone who has gone to grad school in physics. Generally my breadth and depth of knowledge is about right for the kind of work that I do, I think. But last week I was offered a consulting job that might be better done by someone with more conventional stats knowledge than I have. The job involves gene expression in different types of tumors, so it’s “biostatistics” by definition, but the
4 0.12243895 1003 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-11-$
Introduction: Felix Salmon relates the story of an economics Nobel Prize winner getting paid by a hedge fund. It would all seems pretty silly—sort of like Coca-Cola featuring Michael Jordan in their ads—except that hedge funds are disreputable nowadays and so it seems vaguely sleazy for a scholar to trade on his academic reputation to make free money in this way. It falls roughly in the same category as that notorious b-school prof in Inside Job who got $125K for writing a b.s. report about the financial stability of Iceland—and then, when they came back to him later and asked how he could’ve written it, he basically said: Hey, I don’t know anything about Iceland, I was just taking their money! That said, if a hedge fund offered me $125K to sit on their board, I’d probably take it! It’s hard to turn down free money. Or maybe not, I don’t really know. So far, when companies have paid me $, it’s been to do something for them, to consult or give a short course. I’d like to think that if
5 0.12091683 231 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-24-Yet another Bayesian job opportunity
Introduction: Steve Cohen writes: My [Cohen's] firm is looking for strong candidates to help us in developing software and analyzing data using Bayesian methods. We have been developing a suite of programs in C++ which allow us to do Bayesian hierarchical regression and logit/probit models on marketing data. These efforts have included the use of high performance computing tools like nVidia’s CUDA and the new OpenCL standard, which allow parallel processing of Bayesian models. Our software is very, very fast – even on databases that are ½ terabyte in size. The software still needs many additions and improvements and a person with the right skill set will have the chance to make a significant contribution. Here’s the job description he sent: Bayesian statistician and C++ programmer The company In4mation Insights is a marketing research, analytics, and consulting firm which operates on the leading-edge of our industry. Our clients are Fortune 500 companies and major management consul
6 0.11328062 1618 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-11-The consulting biz
7 0.11236894 1519 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-02-Job!
8 0.1101675 1601 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-A lifetime supply of . . .
9 0.10944931 1411 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-10-Defining ourselves arbitrarily
10 0.10824035 320 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-05-Does posterior predictive model checking fit with the operational subjective approach?
11 0.1032358 1909 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-21-Job openings at conservative political analytics firm!
12 0.10210923 1707 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-05-Glenn Hubbard and I were on opposite sides of a court case and I didn’t even know it!
13 0.10113554 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
14 0.10072989 2329 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-11-“What should you talk about?”
15 0.098016858 2297 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-20-Fooled by randomness
16 0.097840734 673 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-20-Upper-income people still don’t realize they’re upper-income
17 0.089682065 1832 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The blogroll
18 0.089212105 8 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-28-Advice to help the rich get richer
19 0.087750718 1611 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-07-Feedback on my Bayesian Data Analysis class at Columbia
20 0.087516166 1248 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-06-17 groups, 6 group-level predictors: What to do?
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.187), (1, -0.066), (2, -0.03), (3, 0.039), (4, 0.014), (5, 0.032), (6, 0.05), (7, 0.015), (8, 0.045), (9, 0.014), (10, -0.021), (11, -0.038), (12, 0.028), (13, 0.019), (14, -0.029), (15, -0.007), (16, -0.002), (17, 0.005), (18, 0.032), (19, 0.046), (20, -0.008), (21, 0.011), (22, 0.025), (23, 0.03), (24, -0.045), (25, -0.071), (26, -0.041), (27, -0.014), (28, -0.008), (29, 0.016), (30, 0.022), (31, 0.014), (32, 0.02), (33, -0.014), (34, -0.016), (35, -0.016), (36, 0.018), (37, 0.05), (38, -0.05), (39, 0.02), (40, 0.037), (41, -0.012), (42, -0.016), (43, 0.05), (44, 0.001), (45, 0.001), (46, -0.012), (47, 0.012), (48, -0.033), (49, -0.032)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.96940202 1597 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-29-What is expected of a consultant
Introduction: Robin Hanson writes on paid expert consulting (of the sort that I do sometime, and is common among economists and statisticians). Hanson agrees with Keith Yost, who says: Fellow consultants and associates . . . [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it. On the other side is Steven Levitt, who Hanson quotes as saying: My own experience has been that even though I know nothing about an industry, if you give me a week, and you get a bunch of really smart people to explain the industry to me, and to tell me what they do, a lot of times what I’ve learned in economics, what I’ve learned in other places can actually be really helpful in changing the way that they see the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly given my Bayesian attitudes and my preference for continuity , I’m inclined to split the d
2 0.84830177 395 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-05-Consulting: how do you figure out what to charge?
Introduction: I’m a physicist by training, statistical data analyst by trade. Although some of my work is pretty standard statistical analysis, more often I work somewhere in a gray area that includes physics, engineering, and statistics. I have very little formal statistics training but I do study in an academic-like way to learn techniques from the literature when I need to. I do some things well but there are big gaps in my stats knowledge compared to anyone who has gone to grad school in statistics. On the other hand, there are big gaps in most statisticians’ physics and engineering knowledge compared to anyone who has gone to grad school in physics. Generally my breadth and depth of knowledge is about right for the kind of work that I do, I think. But last week I was offered a consulting job that might be better done by someone with more conventional stats knowledge than I have. The job involves gene expression in different types of tumors, so it’s “biostatistics” by definition, but the
3 0.84128851 1003 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-11-$
Introduction: Felix Salmon relates the story of an economics Nobel Prize winner getting paid by a hedge fund. It would all seems pretty silly—sort of like Coca-Cola featuring Michael Jordan in their ads—except that hedge funds are disreputable nowadays and so it seems vaguely sleazy for a scholar to trade on his academic reputation to make free money in this way. It falls roughly in the same category as that notorious b-school prof in Inside Job who got $125K for writing a b.s. report about the financial stability of Iceland—and then, when they came back to him later and asked how he could’ve written it, he basically said: Hey, I don’t know anything about Iceland, I was just taking their money! That said, if a hedge fund offered me $125K to sit on their board, I’d probably take it! It’s hard to turn down free money. Or maybe not, I don’t really know. So far, when companies have paid me $, it’s been to do something for them, to consult or give a short course. I’d like to think that if
Introduction: Ever since I got this new sound system for my bike, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. This American Life is really good. I know, I know, everybody knows that, but it’s true. The only segments I don’t like are the ones that are too “writerly,” when they read a short story aloud. They don’t work for me. Most of the time, though, the show is as great as everyone says it is. Anyway, the other day I listened to program #466: Blackjack . It started with some items on card counting. That stuff is always fun. Then they get to the longer story, which is all about a moderately rich housewife from Iowa who, over a roughly ten-year period, lost her life savings, something like a million dollars, at Harrah’s casinos. Did you know they had casinos in Iowa and Indiana? I didn’t. Anyway, the lady was a gambling addict. That part’s pretty clear. You don’t lose your life savings at a casino by accident. The scary part, though, was how the casino company craftily enabled her to
5 0.82499135 835 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-02-“The sky is the limit” isn’t such a good thing
Introduction: A few months ago, in response to some reflections from Steve Hsu, I wrote the following: I’ve long been glad that when I went to college in the 80s, I was at MIT rather than Harvard. Either place I would’ve taken hard classes and learned a lot, but one advantage of MIT was that we had no sense–no sense at all–that we could make big bucks. We had no sense of making moderately big bucks as lawyers, no sense of making big bucks working on Wall Street, and no sense of making really big bucks by starting a business. I mean, sure, we knew about lawyers (but we didn’t know that a lawyer with technical skills would be a killer combination), we knew about Wall Street (but we had no idea what they did, other than shout pork belly prices across a big room), and we knew about tech startups (but we had no idea that they were anything to us beyond a source of jobs for engineers). What we were all looking for was a good solid job with cool benefits (like those companies in California that had gy
6 0.81475031 1596 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-29-More consulting experiences, this time in computational linguistics
7 0.81309813 995 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-06-Statistical models and actual models
9 0.80409932 2080 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-28-Writing for free
10 0.79250294 968 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-21-Could I use a statistics coach?
11 0.79091555 1600 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83
12 0.78904039 693 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-04-Don’t any statisticians work for the IRS?
13 0.78729725 2070 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-20-The institution of tenure
14 0.78576326 489 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-28-Brow inflation
15 0.78506011 640 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-31-Why Edit Wikipedia?
16 0.78440326 979 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-29-Bayesian inference for the parameter of a uniform distribution
17 0.78407669 1882 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-03-The statistical properties of smart chains (and referral chains more generally)
18 0.78107572 895 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-08-How to solve the Post Office’s problems?
19 0.78043097 1007 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-13-At last, treated with the disrespect that I deserve
20 0.77618629 430 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-25-The von Neumann paradox
topicId topicWeight
[(5, 0.014), (12, 0.114), (16, 0.067), (21, 0.011), (24, 0.125), (36, 0.024), (37, 0.014), (42, 0.014), (43, 0.01), (44, 0.017), (53, 0.021), (63, 0.025), (73, 0.014), (89, 0.071), (90, 0.03), (95, 0.026), (99, 0.269)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.95365369 1597 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-29-What is expected of a consultant
Introduction: Robin Hanson writes on paid expert consulting (of the sort that I do sometime, and is common among economists and statisticians). Hanson agrees with Keith Yost, who says: Fellow consultants and associates . . . [said] fifty percent of the job is nodding your head at whatever’s being said, thirty percent of it is just sort of looking good, and the other twenty percent is raising an objection but then if you meet resistance, then dropping it. On the other side is Steven Levitt, who Hanson quotes as saying: My own experience has been that even though I know nothing about an industry, if you give me a week, and you get a bunch of really smart people to explain the industry to me, and to tell me what they do, a lot of times what I’ve learned in economics, what I’ve learned in other places can actually be really helpful in changing the way that they see the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly given my Bayesian attitudes and my preference for continuity , I’m inclined to split the d
2 0.95184302 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
3 0.94360298 1119 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-15-Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award
Introduction: The American Statistical Association is seeking nominations for its annual Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award . The award was created in 2004 to encourage and recognize members of the communications media who have best displayed an informed interest in the science of statistics and its role in public life. The award can be given for a single statistical article or for a body of work. Former winners of the award include: Felix Salmon , financial blogger, 2010; Sharon Begley , Newsweek, 2009; Mark Buchanan, New York Times, 2008; John Berry, Bloomberg News, 2005; and Gina Kolata, New York Times, 2004. If anyone has any suggestions for the 2012 award, feel free to post in the comments or email me.
4 0.94190168 211 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-17-Deducer update
Introduction: A year ago we blogged about Ian Fellows’s R Gui called Deducer (oops, my bad, I meant to link to this ). Fellows sends in this update: Since version 0.1, I [Fellows] have added: 1. A nice plug-in interface, so that people can extend Deducer’s capability without leaving the comfort of R. (see: http://www.deducer.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Development ) 2. Several new dialogs. 3. A one-step installer for windows. 4. A plug-in package (DeducerExtras) which extends the scope of analyses covered. 5. A plotting GUI that can create anything from simple histograms to complex custom graphics. Deducer is designed to be a free easy to use alternative to proprietary data analysis software such as SPSS, JMP, and Minitab. It has a menu system to do common data manipulation and analysis tasks, and an excel-like spreadsheet in which to view and edit data frames. The goal of the project is two fold. Provide an intuitive interface so that non-technical users can learn and p
5 0.93833977 372 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-27-A use for tables (really)
Introduction: After our recent discussion of semigraphic displays, Jay Ulfelder sent along a semigraphic table from his recent book. He notes, “When countries are the units of analysis, it’s nice that you can use three-letter codes, so all the proper names have the same visual weight.” Ultimately I think that graphs win over tables for display. However in our work we spend a lot of time looking at raw data, often simply to understand what data we have. This use of tables has, I think, been forgotten in the statistical graphics literature. So I’d like to refocus the eternal tables vs. graphs discussion. If the goal is to present information, comparisons, relationships, models, data, etc etc, graphs win. Forget about tables. But . . . when you’re looking at your data, it can often help to see the raw numbers. Once you’re looking at numbers, it makes sense to organize them. Even a displayed matrix in R is a form of table, after all. And once you’re making a table, it can be sensible to
6 0.93225658 677 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-24-My NOAA story
7 0.92876816 1282 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-26-Bad news about (some) statisticians
8 0.92396927 239 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-28-The mathematics of democracy
9 0.9222526 434 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-28-When Small Numbers Lead to Big Errors
10 0.91536361 231 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-24-Yet another Bayesian job opportunity
11 0.91303074 1702 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-01-Don’t let your standard errors drive your research agenda
12 0.91268849 1871 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-27-Annals of spam
13 0.91252637 623 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-21-Baseball’s greatest fielders
14 0.91074449 2089 andrew gelman stats-2013-11-04-Shlemiel the Software Developer and Unknown Unknowns
16 0.91010374 840 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-05-An example of Bayesian model averaging
17 0.90903676 1572 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-10-I don’t like this cartoon
18 0.90814924 2142 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-21-Chasing the noise
19 0.90810084 1320 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-14-Question 4 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
20 0.90795004 451 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-05-What do practitioners need to know about regression?