andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1781 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: My paper with Christian Robert, “Not Only Defended But Also Applied”: The Perceived Absurdity of Bayesian Inference , was recently published in The American Statistician, along with discussions by Steve Fienberg, Steve Stigler, Deborah Mayo, and Wesley Johnson, and our rejoinder, The Anti-Bayesian Moment and Its Passing . These articles revolved around the question of why the great probabilist William Feller, in his classic book on probability (“Feller, Volume 1,” as it is known), was so intemperately anti-Bayesian. We located Feller’s attitude within a post-WW2 “anti-Bayesian moment” in which Bayesian inference was perceived as a threat to the dominance of non-Bayesian methods, which were mature enough to have solved problems yet new enough to still appear to have limitless promise. Howard Wainer read this. Howard is a friend who has a longstanding interest in the history of statistics and who also has known a lot of important statisticians over the years. Howard writes: O
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1 These articles revolved around the question of why the great probabilist William Feller, in his classic book on probability (“Feller, Volume 1,” as it is known), was so intemperately anti-Bayesian. [sent-2, score-0.089]
2 We located Feller’s attitude within a post-WW2 “anti-Bayesian moment” in which Bayesian inference was perceived as a threat to the dominance of non-Bayesian methods, which were mature enough to have solved problems yet new enough to still appear to have limitless promise. [sent-3, score-0.455]
3 Howard is a friend who has a longstanding interest in the history of statistics and who also has known a lot of important statisticians over the years. [sent-5, score-0.229]
4 Howard writes: On Feller: I have another theory of his Bayesian antipathy (unlikely perhaps, but not impossible). [sent-6, score-0.335]
5 Tukey always maintained a dislike for Bayesian methods. [sent-7, score-0.077]
6 This was far out of character, for he was a pragmatist and was delighted to use anything that would help. [sent-8, score-0.085]
7 I couldn’t understand it, so the story I made up was that it was less an antipathy to Bayesian methods than it was for rigid Bayesians. [sent-9, score-0.46]
8 While this might be true, the story told in “The Theory that would not die” provided another answer – that he viewed Bayesian methods as a state secret, akin to nuclear secrets of the Manhattan project. [sent-10, score-0.473]
9 That letting out how useful they were would give a boost to America’s enemies (remember the mindset of the late 40s, the 50s and the 60s). [sent-11, score-0.268]
10 This same issue, of a more mercantile nature, arose when he used Bayesian methods for election predictions for NBC. [sent-12, score-0.164]
11 He must’ve felt that this is what gave NBC the edge over the other networks in the speed and accuracy of their projections and he forbade the other members of his prediction team to make public how they did it (check with Velleman or Fienberg for details). [sent-13, score-0.082]
12 While I don’t think that Feller was concerned much about NBC’s corporate secrets, he was certainly a patriot and might have stuck in some gratuitous slams into his book as a red herring to point ‘the enemy’ away from methods that could be a big help to them. [sent-14, score-0.497]
13 The quality of the rest of his work is so high that it is hard to believe that he didn’t have a firm understanding of the limits of frequentist methods as well as the promise of Bayesian ones. [sent-15, score-0.235]
14 Again, remember the mindset of post-WWII America (and the role that Princeton’s statisticians played in the war effort) and the red scare and the attitudes that allowed McCarthy. [sent-16, score-0.509]
15 I’m reminded of my fanciful theory about Linus Pauling and vitamin C. [sent-18, score-0.376]
16 My theory is that Pauling believed in the placebo effect, and that this was his high-stakes attempt to create such an effect, basically leveraging his immense personal and scientific reputation so as to give people the belief that vitamin C really worked. [sent-19, score-0.528]
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Introduction: Xian and I respond to the four discussants of our paper, “Not only defended but also applied”: The perceived absurdity of Bayesian inference.” Here’s the abstract of our rejoinder : Over the years we have often felt frustration, both at smug Bayesians—in particular, those who object to checking of the fit of model to data, either because all Bayesian models are held to be subjective and thus unquestioned (an odd combination indeed, but that is the subject of another article)—and angry anti-Bayesians who, as we wrote in our article, strain on the gnat of the prior distribution while swallowing the camel that is the likelihood. The present article arose from our memory of a particularly intemperate anti-Bayesian statement that appeared in Feller’s beautiful and classic book on probability theory. We felt that it was worth exploring the very extremeness of Feller’s words, along with similar anti-Bayesian remarks by others, in order to better understand the background underlying contr
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Introduction: Paging Uri Simonsohn . . . January 2014: Alice Robb writes , completely uncritically: “If Your Name is Dennis, You’re More Likely to Become a Dentist The strange science of how names shape careers.” But look what you can learn from a quick google: Hmmmm, maybe worth following up on that second link . . . More details here , from 2011: Devah Pager points me to this article by Uri Simonsohn, which begins: Three articles published [by Brett Pelham et al.] have shown that a disproportionate share of people choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their own. These findings, interpreted as evidence of implicit egotism, are included in most modern social psychology textbooks and many university courses. The current article successfully replicates the original findings but shows that they are most likely caused by a combination of cohort, geographic, and ethnic confounds as well as reverse causality. From Simonsohn’s article, here’s a han
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Introduction: Devah Pager points me to this article by Uri Simonsohn, which begins: Three articles published [by Brett Pelham et al.] have shown that a disproportionate share of people choose spouses, places to live, and occupations with names similar to their own. These findings, interpreted as evidence of implicit egotism, are included in most modern social psychology textbooks and many university courses. The current article successfully replicates the original findings but shows that they are most likely caused by a combination of cohort, geographic, and ethnic confounds as well as reverse causality. From Simonsohn’s article, here’s a handy summary of the claims and the evidence (click on it to enlarge): The Pelham et al. articles have come up several times on the blog, starting with this discussion and this estimate and then more recently here . I’m curious what Pelham and his collaborators think of Simonsohn’s claims.
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