andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1616 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: “A small group of mathematicians” Jenny Davidson points to this article by Krugman on Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Given the silliness of the topic, Krugman’s piece is disappointingly serious (“Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it’s not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it’s set in the future, there’s interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details . . . the story can sound arid and didactic. . . . you’ll also be disappointed if you’re looking for shoot-em-up action scenes, in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the nick of time. . . .”). What really jumped out at me from Krugman’s piece, though, was this line: In Foundation, we learn that a small group of mathematicians have developed “psychohistory”, the aforementioned rigorous science of society. Like Davidson (and Krugman), I read the Foundation books as a child. I remember the “psychohisto
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1 Given the silliness of the topic, Krugman’s piece is disappointingly serious (“Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it’s not exactly science fiction – not really. [sent-2, score-0.305]
2 you’ll also be disappointed if you’re looking for shoot-em-up action scenes, in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the nick of time. [sent-11, score-0.056]
3 What really jumped out at me from Krugman’s piece, though, was this line: In Foundation, we learn that a small group of mathematicians have developed “psychohistory”, the aforementioned rigorous science of society. [sent-16, score-0.282]
4 Like Davidson (and Krugman), I read the Foundation books as a child. [sent-17, score-0.09]
5 I remember the “psychohistory” part, of course, but not that it was invented by mathematicians. [sent-18, score-0.107]
6 Thus you had Mandelbrot inventing fractals, Turing inventing computer science, and Ulam inventing the H-bomb. [sent-21, score-0.654]
7 Nowadays, I think of mathematicians as a sort of eccentric band of specialists, working for decades on problems that only they care about, while earning money teaching intro calc and training graduate students to work for Steven A. [sent-22, score-0.506]
8 I’m not saying that’s a fair impression—it would be just as correct for a mathematician to describe statisticians as an eccentric band of mathematical plodders who make a virtue of their mediocrity and call it practicality—but it’s the impression I get. [sent-24, score-0.356]
9 If I were writing a novel about an exciting new science, I might have it be invented by a biologist or a computer scientist or even a rogue economist, but I probably wouldn’t think that something so applied would come out of the minds of a band of mathematicians. [sent-25, score-0.4]
10 Updating that to the present day, we’d end up with someone like John McAfee, that internet zillionaire who turned up in Guatemala the other day. [sent-27, score-0.069]
11 Actually, McAfee sounds like a perfect Heinlein hero: a super-rich retired businessman with a fascination with airplanes, guns, and drugs, and a 20-year-old girlfriend. [sent-28, score-0.119]
12 Of course, if we were really living in a Heinlein story, McAfee would actually have a time machine in his backyard, and that girlfriend would be a reincarnation of McAfee’s cat. [sent-29, score-0.125]
13 At the very end of the Krugman article: The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, introduced by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, is published by The Folio Society priced £75. [sent-32, score-0.069]
14 What I wonder is, how many people who buy this book will really want to read it all the way through. [sent-35, score-0.09]
15 Reading about the Foundation trilogy can be fun, but I can’t imagine the book itself can be very easy or pleasant to read at this point. [sent-36, score-0.242]
16 I just feel that at this point I’ve read so many smooth works of fiction and journalism over the years, that it might be difficult to read something that wooden in style. [sent-37, score-0.282]
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Introduction: “A small group of mathematicians” Jenny Davidson points to this article by Krugman on Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Given the silliness of the topic, Krugman’s piece is disappointingly serious (“Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it’s not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it’s set in the future, there’s interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details . . . the story can sound arid and didactic. . . . you’ll also be disappointed if you’re looking for shoot-em-up action scenes, in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the nick of time. . . .”). What really jumped out at me from Krugman’s piece, though, was this line: In Foundation, we learn that a small group of mathematicians have developed “psychohistory”, the aforementioned rigorous science of society. Like Davidson (and Krugman), I read the Foundation books as a child. I remember the “psychohisto
Introduction: After noticing these remarks on expensive textbooks and this comment on the company that bribes professors to use their books, Preston McAfee pointed me to this update (complete with a picture of some guy who keeps threatening to sue him but never gets around to it). The story McAfee tells is sad but also hilarious. Especially the part about “smuck.” It all looks like one more symptom of the imploding market for books. Prices for intro stat and econ books go up and up (even mediocre textbooks routinely cost $150), and the publishers put more and more effort into promotion. McAfee adds: I [McAfee] hope a publisher sues me about posting the articles I wrote. Even a takedown notice would be fun. I would be pretty happy to start posting about that, especially when some of them are charging $30 per article. Ted Bergstrom and I used state Freedom of Information acts to extract the journal price deals at state university libraries. We have about 35 of them so far. Like te
Introduction: That’s ok , Krugman earlier slammed Galbraith. (I wonder if Krugman is as big a fan of “tough choices” now as he was in 1996 .) Given Krugman’s politicization in recent years, I’m surprised he’s so dismissive of the political (rather than technical-economic) nature of Hayek’s influence. (I don’t know if he’s changed his views on Galbraith in recent years.) P.S. Greg Mankiw, in contrast, labels Galbraith and Hayek as “two of the great economists of the 20th century” and writes, “even though their most famous works were written many decades ago, they are still well worth reading today.”
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Introduction: Even if a policymaker is sure of the ideal economic policy, he or she can only implement it with the help of some of the other political players. But I’m saying something different, echoing what I wrote a couple days ago. I thought of this the other day after seeing this recent quote from Paul Krugman ( extracted by Brad DeLong) about Larry “Starbucks” Summers: Summers is . . . indistinguishable from me [Krugman] on macro-policy. And he may be a bit to the left, because he’s even more certain than I am . . . that some extra spending now will actually help us more in fiscal terms. So he published a piece in the Financial Times that was meant to be a big statement about this. But before he got to that, he spend three paragraphs about the importance of dealing with the deficit in the medium term . . . to establish that ‘I am a respectable person; I am not like that rabble-rouser, Krugman.’ . . . Maybe. But, going back to 2009, I still suspect that Summers, or some part of S
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Introduction: “A small group of mathematicians” Jenny Davidson points to this article by Krugman on Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. Given the silliness of the topic, Krugman’s piece is disappointingly serious (“Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it’s not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it’s set in the future, there’s interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details . . . the story can sound arid and didactic. . . . you’ll also be disappointed if you’re looking for shoot-em-up action scenes, in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the nick of time. . . .”). What really jumped out at me from Krugman’s piece, though, was this line: In Foundation, we learn that a small group of mathematicians have developed “psychohistory”, the aforementioned rigorous science of society. Like Davidson (and Krugman), I read the Foundation books as a child. I remember the “psychohisto
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen links approvingly to this review by B. R. Myers of a book that I haven’t read. Unlike Cowen, I haven’t seen the book in question–so far, I’ve only read the excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker–but I can say that I found Myers’s review very annoying. Myers writes: The same narrator who gives us “sucked” and “very into” also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang. . . . But if Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. . . . Are we to chuckle at the adult woman for writing this in seriousness, or is she mocking her younger self, the teenage ra
Introduction: There’s this idea called “domain specificity” that I learned from my sister many years ago: it’s the idea that a skill might work in some domains but not others. For example, knowing (some) Spanish helps a bit with my French but it doesn’t do anything for my Chinese. Traditionally in psychometrics, this sort of thing is studied using correlation–scores on various math tests are highly correlated with each other, and these are also correlated (but less so) with scores on English tests. Michael Jordan would probably be good at just about any sport he tried (even if he couldn’t quite hit the curveball). Top actors can typically sing, dance, do magic, etc.–they’re great all-around performers. And so on. I was reminded of domain specificity after reading a blog by Felix Salmon arguing that Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers made big mistakes when they served as Treasury Secretaries during the Clinton administration. Salmon writes: The connection here is a direct one: the singl
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