andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1730 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Last week I posted skeptical remarks about Ron Unz’s claim that Harvard admissions discriminate in favor of Jews. The comment thread was getting long enough there that I thought it most fair to give Unz a chance to present his thoughts here as a new post. I’ve done that before in cases where I’ve disagreed with someone and he wanted to make his views clear. I will post Unz’s email and my brief response. This is what Unz wrote to me: Since there’s been a great deal of dispute over the numerator and the denominator, it might be useful for each of us should provide our own estimate-range of what we believe are the true figures, and the justification. Perhaps if our ranges actually overlap substantially, then we don’t really disagree much after all. I’d think if you’ve been reading most of the endless comments and refreshing your memory about my claims, you’ve probably now developed your own mental model about the likely reality of the values whereas initially you may have simpl
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1 Last week I posted skeptical remarks about Ron Unz’s claim that Harvard admissions discriminate in favor of Jews. [sent-1, score-0.265]
2 This is what Unz wrote to me: Since there’s been a great deal of dispute over the numerator and the denominator, it might be useful for each of us should provide our own estimate-range of what we believe are the true figures, and the justification. [sent-5, score-0.304]
3 Based on my detailed analysis of the NMS semifinalist lists, I’d feel pretty confident that the national percentage of Jewish students is within the range 5. [sent-9, score-0.403]
4 My greatest irritation was that despite considerable effort I never managed to locate lists from NJ or CT, which have large, academically-elite Jewish populations. [sent-12, score-0.203]
5 Obviously, questions can be raised about whether NMS semifinalist numbers are the best numerator to use as a high-performance proxy, but since SAT distributions aren’t available, I just can’t think of any better one. [sent-16, score-0.349]
6 The numerator is the percentage of Jews enrolled at Harvard and the Ivies, and the heated dispute there has been a total surprise to me. [sent-17, score-0.436]
7 None of the colleges make their enrollment lists publicly available, so if we don’t use the Hillel figures at least in some modified form, I’m just not sure what we can use instead. [sent-18, score-0.19]
8 I would never claim that the Hillel figures are precisely accurate—I emphasized the uncertainly in my text—but I just doubt they’re wildly inaccurate either. [sent-19, score-0.32]
9 Thus, my plausible range would be 20-25%, with similar sorts of ranges for the other Ivies. [sent-22, score-0.314]
10 But I’d be pretty skeptical of whether the Hillel numbers were inflated by more than about 25% or so (20% => 25%). [sent-23, score-0.227]
11 According to the Hillel numbers and the official racial data, Jews constitute between one-half and two-thirds of all the white Americans enrolled at each of the Ivies except for Princeton and Dartmouth. [sent-25, score-0.268]
12 These are huge fractions and if the actual reality were totally different, surely *some* Jewish students would have realized that Hillel’s numbers were ridiculous and complained somewhere. [sent-27, score-0.207]
13 If Hillel regularly claims that 60% of the white students at some college are Jewish, but the true figure were 30%, it’s difficult to believe no one would have noticed. [sent-28, score-0.35]
14 Therefore, if we focus strictly on Harvard, my plausible range over the last few years would be 20-25% Jewish and 24-29% non-Jewish white (assuming the Race Unknown category is split 50-50 white and Asian), with the total Ivy figures following a similar pattern. [sent-29, score-0.526]
15 0% of top performing students with NJWs at 65-70%, while the Harvard ranges are 20-25% for Jews and 24-29% for NJWs. [sent-32, score-0.263]
16 Thus, the range of “raw” Jewish over-representation relative to high-performing NJW students is between 540% and 1200%, while the range across the entire Ivy League would be between 420% and 950%. [sent-33, score-0.3]
17 But I’d argue these raw figures are so enormous, it’s difficult to see how they wouldn’t still remain very sizable even after any reasonable provision is made for those factors. [sent-36, score-0.2]
18 So if you would like to provide me what you think are the plausible ranges for the Jewish numerator (high-ability students nationwide) and denominator (Jewish Harvard/Ivy enrollments), perhaps we can begin to isolate and resolve the nature of our possible disagreement. [sent-42, score-0.58]
19 Such sloppy counting makes a difference: it leads to an impression of a dramatic decline in Jewish performance in this area, while the best estimates from an expert in the area is that the decline is a factor of 2 rather than a factor of 15. [sent-67, score-0.433]
20 The sloppiness in the counting comes from the use of an undefined criterion for classification which allows unintended bias to creep in. [sent-68, score-0.202]
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Introduction: Last week I posted skeptical remarks about Ron Unz’s claim that Harvard admissions discriminate in favor of Jews. The comment thread was getting long enough there that I thought it most fair to give Unz a chance to present his thoughts here as a new post. I’ve done that before in cases where I’ve disagreed with someone and he wanted to make his views clear. I will post Unz’s email and my brief response. This is what Unz wrote to me: Since there’s been a great deal of dispute over the numerator and the denominator, it might be useful for each of us should provide our own estimate-range of what we believe are the true figures, and the justification. Perhaps if our ranges actually overlap substantially, then we don’t really disagree much after all. I’d think if you’ve been reading most of the endless comments and refreshing your memory about my claims, you’ve probably now developed your own mental model about the likely reality of the values whereas initially you may have simpl
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
3 0.4562206 1743 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-28-Different modes of discourse
Introduction: Political/business negotiation vs. scholarly communication. In a negotiation you hold back, you only make concessions if you have to or in exchange for something else. In scholarly communication you look for your own mistakes, you volunteer information to others, and if someone points out a mistake, you learn from it. (Just a couple days ago, in fact, someone sent me an email showing a problem with bayesglm. I ran and altered his code, and it turned out we had a problem. Based on this information, Yu-Sung found and fixed the code. I was grateful to be informed of the problem.) Not all scholarly exchange goes like this, but that’s the ideal. In contrast, openness and transparency are not ideals in politics and business; in many cases they’re not even desired. If Barack Obama and John Boehner are negotiating on the budget, would it be appropriate for one of them to just start off the negotiations by making a bunch of concessions for free? No, of course not. Negotiation doesn
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Introduction: The following is source material regarding our recent discussion of Jewish admission to Ivy League colleges. I’m posting it for the same reason that I earlier posted a message from Ron Unz, out of a goal to allow the data and arguments to be made as clearly as possible. Janet Mertz writes: I became involved in the discussion of Ron Unz’s Meritocracy article because I am a leading expert on the demographics of top-scoring participants in the high school International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the US/Canadian inter-collegiate Putnam Mathematics Competition. I have published three peer-reviewed articles that include data directly related to this topic . . . Had Unz read my 2008 Notices article, he would have known his claim that Jewish achievement in these two competitions had collapsed in the 21st century (which was cited by David Brooks in the New York Times) was simply not true. . . . The primary questions addressed in this article are the following: (i) Do the Ivy
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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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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
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Introduction: The following is source material regarding our recent discussion of Jewish admission to Ivy League colleges. I’m posting it for the same reason that I earlier posted a message from Ron Unz, out of a goal to allow the data and arguments to be made as clearly as possible. Janet Mertz writes: I became involved in the discussion of Ron Unz’s Meritocracy article because I am a leading expert on the demographics of top-scoring participants in the high school International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the US/Canadian inter-collegiate Putnam Mathematics Competition. I have published three peer-reviewed articles that include data directly related to this topic . . . Had Unz read my 2008 Notices article, he would have known his claim that Jewish achievement in these two competitions had collapsed in the 21st century (which was cited by David Brooks in the New York Times) was simply not true. . . . The primary questions addressed in this article are the following: (i) Do the Ivy
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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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Introduction: Here. And here’s the story so far: Ron Unz posted a long article on college admissions of Asians and Jews with some numbers and comparisons that made their way into some blogs (including here ) and also a David Brooks NYT column which was read by many people, including Janet Mertz, who’d done previous research on ethnic composition of high-end math students. Mertz contacted me (she’d earlier tried Brooks and others but received no helpful reply), and I posted her findings along with those of another correspondent. Unz then replied , motivating Mertz to write a seven-page document expanding on her earlier emails. Unz responded to that, characterizing Mertz as maybe “emotional” but not actually disputing any of her figures. Unz did, however, make the unconvincing (to me) implication that his original numbers were basically OK even in light of Mertz’s corrections. So Mertz responded once more . (There’s also a side discussion about women’s representation in m
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Introduction: Remember How to Lie With Statistics? It turns out that the author worked for the cigarette companies. John Mashey points to this, from Robert Proctor’s book, “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition”: Darrell Huff, author of the wildly popular (and aptly named) How to Lie With Statistics, was paid to testify before Congress in the 1950s and then again in the 1960s, with the assigned task of ridiculing any notion of a cigarette-disease link. On March 22, 1965, Huff testified at hearings on cigarette labeling and advertising, accusing the recent Surgeon General’s report of myriad failures and “fallacies.” Huff peppered his attack with with amusing asides and anecdotes, lampooning spurious correlations like that between the size of Dutch families and the number of storks nesting on rooftops–which proves not that storks bring babies but rather that people with large families tend to have larger houses (which therefore attract more storks).
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Introduction: Last week I posted skeptical remarks about Ron Unz’s claim that Harvard admissions discriminate in favor of Jews. The comment thread was getting long enough there that I thought it most fair to give Unz a chance to present his thoughts here as a new post. I’ve done that before in cases where I’ve disagreed with someone and he wanted to make his views clear. I will post Unz’s email and my brief response. This is what Unz wrote to me: Since there’s been a great deal of dispute over the numerator and the denominator, it might be useful for each of us should provide our own estimate-range of what we believe are the true figures, and the justification. Perhaps if our ranges actually overlap substantially, then we don’t really disagree much after all. I’d think if you’ve been reading most of the endless comments and refreshing your memory about my claims, you’ve probably now developed your own mental model about the likely reality of the values whereas initially you may have simpl
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