andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1758 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Philosopher L. A. Paul and sociologist Kieran Healy write : Choosing to have a child involves a leap of faith, not a carefully calibrated rational choice. When surprising results surface about the dissatisfaction many parents experience, telling yourself that you knew it wouldn’t be that way for you is simply a rationalization. The same is true if you tell yourself you know you’re happier not being a parent. The standard story of parenthood says it’s a deeply fulfilling event that is like nothing else you’ve ever experienced, and that you should carefully weigh what it will be like before choosing to do it. But in reality you can’t have it both ways. I disagree that you can’t have it both ways, for three reasons: 1. Many potential parents do have an idea of what it will be like to be a parent, having participated in child care as an older sibling, aunt, or uncle. 2. The decision of whether to have a child occurs many times: the decision of whether to have a second child
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1 Paul and sociologist Kieran Healy write : Choosing to have a child involves a leap of faith, not a carefully calibrated rational choice. [sent-3, score-0.956]
2 When surprising results surface about the dissatisfaction many parents experience, telling yourself that you knew it wouldn’t be that way for you is simply a rationalization. [sent-4, score-0.295]
3 The standard story of parenthood says it’s a deeply fulfilling event that is like nothing else you’ve ever experienced, and that you should carefully weigh what it will be like before choosing to do it. [sent-6, score-0.411]
4 Many potential parents do have an idea of what it will be like to be a parent, having participated in child care as an older sibling, aunt, or uncle. [sent-9, score-0.638]
5 The decision of whether to have a child occurs many times: the decision of whether to have a second child, a third child, etc. [sent-11, score-0.771]
6 All these decisions after the first child are directly informed. [sent-12, score-0.373]
7 People are similar to each other in many ways, and you can learn a lot about future outcomes by observing older people (or by reading research such as that popularized by Kahneman, regarding predicted vs. [sent-15, score-0.461]
8 Thus, I think it’s perfectly rational to aim to have (or not have) a child, with the decision a more-or-less rational calculation based on extrapolation from the experiences of older people, similar to oneself, who’ve faced the same decision earlier in their lives. [sent-17, score-1.554]
9 And here is as good a place as any to emphasize that I’m not trying to “debate” or “debunk” Paul and Healy but rather to integrate their ideas with other things I know about. [sent-20, score-0.058]
10 Humans: Rational animals or irrational computers? [sent-21, score-0.25]
11 I’m sensitive to this particular issue because I see Paul and Healy’s article as taking what might be considered a generally “humanistic” position that there are limits to the value of rational calculation. [sent-22, score-0.459]
12 But to me, as a statistician, there’s nothing particularly humanistic about disparaging rationality. [sent-23, score-0.276]
13 To put it another way, it used to be that humans were defined as the rational animal. [sent-25, score-0.616]
14 Nowadays it almost seems the opposite, that we are defined as irrational computers. [sent-26, score-0.167]
15 , we indeed look rational (even after accounting for the fact that animals behave rationally in many situations). [sent-28, score-0.767]
16 But we’re not computers, we’re animals [I apologize to Rick Santorum and any other creationist readers of this blog], so I think our (imperfect) rational thought and behavior is nothing to shy away from. [sent-31, score-0.81]
17 Indeed, even Paul and Healy, when denying that we can be rational in setting childbirth aims, do acknowledge that people are following thought process that have the form of rational reasoning, they’re just claiming that the inputs to this reasoning are empty of real content. [sent-32, score-1.171]
18 The aim (not decision) to have a child I write “aim” to have a child rather than “decide,” because many people who want children, can’t have them, and many other people who don’t want children end up with them anyway. [sent-33, score-1.261]
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Introduction: Philosopher L. A. Paul and sociologist Kieran Healy write : Choosing to have a child involves a leap of faith, not a carefully calibrated rational choice. When surprising results surface about the dissatisfaction many parents experience, telling yourself that you knew it wouldn’t be that way for you is simply a rationalization. The same is true if you tell yourself you know you’re happier not being a parent. The standard story of parenthood says it’s a deeply fulfilling event that is like nothing else you’ve ever experienced, and that you should carefully weigh what it will be like before choosing to do it. But in reality you can’t have it both ways. I disagree that you can’t have it both ways, for three reasons: 1. Many potential parents do have an idea of what it will be like to be a parent, having participated in child care as an older sibling, aunt, or uncle. 2. The decision of whether to have a child occurs many times: the decision of whether to have a second child
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Introduction: John Sides followed up on a discussion of his earlier claim that political independents vote for president in a reasonable way based on economic performance. John’s original post led to the amazing claim by New Republic writer Jonathan Chait that John wouldn’t “even want to be friends with anybody who” voted in this manner. I’ve been sensitive to discussions of rationality and voting ever since Aaron Edlin, Noah Kaplan, and I wrote our article on voting as a rational choice: why and how people vote to improve the well-being of others. Models of rationality are controversial In politics, just as they are in other fields ranging from economics to criminology. On one side you have people trying to argue that all behavior is rational, from lottery playing to drug addiction to engaging in email with exiled Nigerian royalty. Probably the only behavior that nobody has yet to claim is rational is blogging, but I bet that’s coming too. From the other direction, lots of people poi
Introduction: I think I’m starting to resolve a puzzle that’s been bugging me for awhile. Pop economists (or, at least, pop micro-economists) are often making one of two arguments: 1. People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist. 2. People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient. Argument 1 is associated with “why do they do that?” sorts of puzzles. Why do they charge so much for candy at the movie theater, why are airline ticket prices such a mess, why are people drug addicts, etc. The usual answer is that there’s some rational reason for what seems like silly or self-destructive behavior. Argument 2 is associated with “we can do better” claims such as why we should fire 80% of public-schools teachers or Moneyball-style stories about how some clever entrepreneur has made a zillion dollars by exploiting some inefficienc
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Introduction: Nowadays “Bayesian” is often taken to be a synonym for rationality, and I can see how this can irritate thoughtful philosophers and statisticians alike: To start with, lots of rational thinking—even lots of rational statistical inference—does not occur within the Bayesian formalism. And, to look at it from the other direction, lots of self-proclaimed Bayesian inference hardly seems rational at all. And in what way is “subjective probability” a model for rational scientific inquiry? On the contrary, subjectivity and rationality are in many ways opposites! [emphasis added] The goal of this paper is to break the link between Bayesian modeling (good, in my opinion) and subjectivity (bad). From this perspective, the irritation of falsificationists regarding exaggerated claims of Bayesian rationality are my ally. . . . See here for the full article, to appear in the journal Rationality, Markets and Morals.
Introduction: We recently considered a pair of studies that came out awhile ago involving children and political orientation: Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that, in Great Britain, parents of girls were more likely to support left-wing parties, compared to parents of boys. And, in the other direction, Dalton Conley and Emily Rauscher found with survey data from the United States that parents of girls were more likely to support the Republican party, compared to parents of boys. As I discussed the other day, the latest version of the Conley and Raucher study came with some incoherent evolutionary theorizing. There was also some discussion regarding the differences between the two studies. Oswald sent me some relevant comments: It will be hard in cross-sections like the GSS to solve the problem of endogeneity bias. Conservative families may want to have boys, and may use that as a stopping rule. If so, they will end up with disproportionately large number of girls. Without l
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Introduction: Philosopher L. A. Paul and sociologist Kieran Healy write : Choosing to have a child involves a leap of faith, not a carefully calibrated rational choice. When surprising results surface about the dissatisfaction many parents experience, telling yourself that you knew it wouldn’t be that way for you is simply a rationalization. The same is true if you tell yourself you know you’re happier not being a parent. The standard story of parenthood says it’s a deeply fulfilling event that is like nothing else you’ve ever experienced, and that you should carefully weigh what it will be like before choosing to do it. But in reality you can’t have it both ways. I disagree that you can’t have it both ways, for three reasons: 1. Many potential parents do have an idea of what it will be like to be a parent, having participated in child care as an older sibling, aunt, or uncle. 2. The decision of whether to have a child occurs many times: the decision of whether to have a second child
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Introduction: Ole Rogeberg sends in this: and writes: No idea if this is amusing to non-economists, but I tried my hand at the xtranormal-trend. It’s an attempt to spoof the many standard “incantations” I’ve encountered over the years from economists who don’t want to agree that rational addiction theory lacks justification for some of the claims it makes. More specifically, the claims that the theory can be used to conduct welfare analysis of alternative policies. See here (scroll to Rational Addiction) and here for background.
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Introduction: Andrew Mack writes: There was a brief commentary from the Benetech folk on the Human Security Report Project’s, “The Shrinking Costs of War” report on your blog in January. But the report has since generated a lot of public controversy . Since the report–like the current discussion in your blog on Mike Spagat’s new paper on Iraq–deals with controversies generated by survey-based excess death estimates, we thought your readers might be interested. Our responses to the debate were posted on our website last week. “Shrinking Costs” had discussed the dramatic decline in death tolls from wartime violence since the end of World War II –and its causes. We also argued that deaths from war-exacerbated disease and malnutrition had declined. (The exec. summary is here .) One of the most striking findings was that mortality rates (we used under-five mortality data) decline during most wars. Indeed our latest research indicates that of the total number of years that countries w
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Introduction: Hamdan Azhar writes: I came across this graphic of vaccine-attributed decreases in mortality and was curious if you found it as unattractive and unintuitive as I did. Hope all is well with you! My reply: All’s well with me. And yes, that’s one horrible graph. It has all the problems with a bad infographic with none of the virtues. Compared to this monstrosity, the typical USA Today graph is a stunning, beautiful masterpiece. I don’t think I want to soil this webpage with the image. In fact, I don’t even want to link to it.
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