andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1768 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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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1 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. [sent-3, score-0.263]
2 Unz then replied , motivating Mertz to write a seven-page document expanding on her earlier emails. [sent-4, score-0.326]
3 Unz responded to that, characterizing Mertz as maybe “emotional” but not actually disputing any of her figures. [sent-5, score-0.27]
4 Unz did, however, make the unconvincing (to me) implication that his original numbers were basically OK even in light of Mertz’s corrections. [sent-6, score-0.266]
5 (There’s also a side discussion about women’s representation in mathematics, an interesting topic but one I’m ignoring here as not being relevant to the main point of discussion. [sent-8, score-0.192]
6 I particularly like this bit, which I think has more general application: Unz considered “five minutes of cursory surname analysis” a sufficient basis on which to claim an important unexpected discovery, i. [sent-10, score-0.444]
7 , a rapid collapse in Jewish very high-end achievement in the 21st century. [sent-12, score-0.206]
8 Most unexpected discoveries are found not to be true when additional analyses are performed to test their validity. [sent-13, score-0.264]
9 If I had put together a number based on a cursory five minute analysis, and if that number had appeared in the Times, and then someone went to the trouble of correcting me, I’d be on the phone with the newspaper right away asking them to issue a correction. [sent-15, score-0.645]
10 Again, to issue this correction would not necessarily require Unz to back off from all his larger conclusions; he’d just have to modify his claims in light of the data, which is a good idea in any case but especially true when confronted with much higher quality data than what you started with. [sent-17, score-0.445]
11 For an answer to this question, I refer you to the last part of this earlier post , the part entitled, “A couple more things (for now). [sent-21, score-0.112]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 1768 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-18-Mertz’s reply to Unz’s response to Mertz’s comments on Unz’s article
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: 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: 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
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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1 0.96927011 1751 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-06-Janet Mertz’s response to “The Myth of American Meritocracy”
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: 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: 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
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
Introduction: I was thinking more about David Brooks’s anti-data column from yesterday, and I realized what is really bothering me. Brooks expresses skepticism about numbers, about the limitations of raw data, about the importance of human thinking. Fine, I agree with all of this, to some extent. But then Brooks turns around uses numbers and unquestioningly and uncritically (OK, not completely uncritically; see P.S. below). In a notorious recent case, Brooks wrote, in the context of college admissions: You’re going to want to argue with Unz’s article all the way along, especially for its narrow, math-test-driven view of merit. But it’s potentially ground-shifting. Unz’s other big point is that Jews are vastly overrepresented at elite universities and that Jewish achievement has collapsed. In the 1970s, for example, 40 percent of top scorers in the Math Olympiad had Jewish names. Now 2.5 percent do. But these numbers are incorrect, as I learned from a professor of oncology at the Univ
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Introduction: Antonio Ramos writes: The book with Hill has very little on longitudinal models. So do you recommended any reference to complement your book on covariance structures typical from these models, such as AR(1), Antedependence, Factor Analytic, etc? I am very much interest in BUGS code for these basic models as well as how to extend them to more complex situations. My reply: There is a book by Banerjee, Carlin, and Gelfand on Bayesian space-time models. Beyond that, I think there is good work in psychometrics on covaraince structures but I don’t know the literature.
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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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