andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1787 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Someone told me he ran into someone who said his goal was to be Tyler Cowen. OK, fine, it’s a worthy goal, but I don’t think it’s so easy .
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same-blog 1 1.0 1787 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-04-Wanna be the next Tyler Cowen? It’s not as easy as you might think!
Introduction: Someone told me he ran into someone who said his goal was to be Tyler Cowen. OK, fine, it’s a worthy goal, but I don’t think it’s so easy .
2 0.11153179 1081 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-24-Statistical ethics violation
Introduction: A colleague writes: When I was in NYC I went to this party by group of Japanese bio-scientists. There, one guy told me about how the biggest pharmaceutical company in Japan did their statistics. They ran 100 different tests and reported the most significant one. (This was in 2006 and he said they stopped doing this few years back so they were doing this until pretty recently…) I’m not sure if this was 100 multiple comparison or 100 different kinds of test but I’m sure they wouldn’t want to disclose their data… Ouch!
3 0.1017018 912 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-15-n = 2
Introduction: People in Chicago are nice. The conductor on the train came by and I asked if I could buy a ticket right there. He said yes, $2.50. While I was getting the money he asked if the ticket machine at the station had been broken. I said, I don’t know, I saw the train and ran up the stairs to catch it. He said, that’s not what you’re supposed to say. So I said, that’s right, the machine was broken. It’s just like on that radio show where Peter Sagal hems and haws to clue the contestant in that his guess is wrong so he can try again.
4 0.099746637 276 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-14-Don’t look at just one poll number–unless you really know what you’re doing!
Introduction: Here’s a good one if you want to tell your students about question wording bias. It’s fun because the data are all on the web–the research is something that students could do on their own–if they know what to look for. Another win for Google. Here’s the story. I found the following graph on the front page of the American Enterprise Institute, a well-known D.C. think tank: My first thought was that they should replace this graph by a time series, which would show so much more information. I did a web search and, indeed, looking at a broad range of poll questions over time gives us a much richer perspective on public opinion about Afghanistan than is revealed in the above graph. I did a quick google search (“polling report afghanistan”) and found this . The quick summary is that roughly 40% of Americans favor the Afghan war (down from about 50% from 2006 through early 2009). The Polling Report page also features the Quninipiac poll featured in the above graph; here it r
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Introduction: A few years ago I watched a bunch of Speed Racer cartoons with Phil in a movie theater in the early 90s. These were low-budget Japanese cartoons from the 60s that we loved as kids. From my adult perspective, the best parts were during the characters’ long drives, where you could see Japanese industrial scenes in the background. Similarly, sometimes the most interesting aspect of a book or article is not its overt content but rather its unexamined assumptions. I was reminded of this today when reading the Times this morning. In an interesting column reviewing recent research on happiness (marred only by his decision not to interview any psychology researchers; after all, they’re the academic experts on the topic), Adam Davidson writes : So much debate about government policy is based on economic statistics that come out of the market. But the goal of government is not just to maximize revenue. This perked me up. Not just to maximize revenue? This has to be a sign of the
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same-blog 1 0.98501658 1787 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-04-Wanna be the next Tyler Cowen? It’s not as easy as you might think!
Introduction: Someone told me he ran into someone who said his goal was to be Tyler Cowen. OK, fine, it’s a worthy goal, but I don’t think it’s so easy .
2 0.73380625 1007 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-13-At last, treated with the disrespect that I deserve
Introduction: I was at a work-related event today [actually, last month; these non-topical blog entries are on approximately one-month delay], but not connected to the statistics or political science departments. There were a few people there I knew well, and they were introducing me to others. Then at some point when I was talking with one of the more important people in the room, a sixtyish guy comes by and stands next to us. I put out my hand and introduce myself. He looks at me in puzzlement, spits out his first name, and without a pause starts talking to the person I’d been speaking with. After about a minute of talk, he walks away, and the important person and I continued our conversation. No big deal . . . but, I have to admit, I haven’t had that experience very often recently. I’m often at events where I know everyone (or almost everyone) and they know me, and I’m also often at events where I know very few people and have to introduce myself. But it’s rare to be somewhere where I’m
3 0.7258594 430 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-25-The von Neumann paradox
Introduction: I, like Steve Hsu , I too would love to read a definitive biography of John von Neumann (or, as we’d say in the U.S., “John Neumann”). I’ve read little things about him in various places such as Stanislaw Ulam’s classic autobiography, and two things I’ve repeatedly noticed are: 1. Neumann comes off as a obnoxious, self-satisfied jerk. He just seems like the kind of guy I wouldn’t like in real life. 2. All these great men seem to really have loved the guy. It’s hard for me to reconcile two impressions above. Of course, lots of people have a good side and a bad side, but what’s striking here is that my impressions of Neumann’s bad side come from the very stories that his friends use to demonstrate how lovable he was! So, yes, I’d like to see the biography–but only if it could resolve this paradox. Also, I don’t know how relevant this is, but Neumann shares one thing with the more-lovable Ulam and the less-lovable Mandelbrot: all had Jewish backgrounds but didn’t seem to
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Introduction: I just got called by a robo-poll. I really think there should be a law that anyone who wants to call like this should be a real person and supply their home phone number. This sort of one-way contact is nothing more than harassment. As well as poisoning the well by reducing the inclination of people to participate in legitimate surveys.
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Introduction: Obit here . I think I have a cousin with the same last name as this guy, so maybe we’re related by marriage in some way. (By that standard we’re also related to Marge Simpson and, I seem to recall, the guy who wrote the scripts for Dark Shadows.)
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same-blog 1 0.98940128 1787 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-04-Wanna be the next Tyler Cowen? It’s not as easy as you might think!
Introduction: Someone told me he ran into someone who said his goal was to be Tyler Cowen. OK, fine, it’s a worthy goal, but I don’t think it’s so easy .
2 0.95965779 482 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-23-Capitalism as a form of voluntarism
Introduction: Interesting discussion by Alex Tabarrok (following up on an article by Rebecca Solnit) on the continuum between voluntarism (or, more generally, non-cash transactions) and markets with monetary exchange. I just have a few comments of my own: 1. Solnit writes of “the iceberg economy,” which she characterizes as “based on gift economies, barter, mutual aid, and giving without hope of return . . . the relations between friends, between family members, the activities of volunteers or those who have chosen their vocation on principle rather than for profit.” I just wonder whether “barter” completely fits in here. Maybe it depends on context. Sometimes barter is an informal way of keeping track (you help me and I help you), but in settings of low liquidity I could imagine barter being simply an inefficient way of performing an economic transaction. 2. I am no expert on capitalism but my impression is that it’s not just about “competition and selfishness” but also is related to the
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Introduction: A couple days ago we discussed some remarks by Tony O’Hagan and Jim Berger on weakly informative priors. Jim followed up on Deborah Mayo’s blog with this: Objective Bayesian priors are often improper (i.e., have infinite total mass), but this is not a problem when they are developed correctly. But not every improper prior is satisfactory. For instance, the constant prior is known to be unsatisfactory in many situations. The ‘solution’ pseudo-Bayesians often use is to choose a constant prior over a large but bounded set (a ‘weakly informative’ prior), saying it is now proper and so all is well. This is not true; if the constant prior on the whole parameter space is bad, so will be the constant prior over the bounded set. The problem is, in part, that some people confuse proper priors with subjective priors and, having learned that true subjective priors are fine, incorrectly presume that weakly informative proper priors are fine. I have a few reactions to this: 1. I agree
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Introduction: Someone named James writes: I’m working on a classification task, sentence segmentation. The classifier algorithm we use (BoosTexter, a boosted learning algorithm) classifies each word independently conditional on its features, i.e. a bag-of-words model, so any contextual clues need to be encoded into the features. The feature extraction system I am proposing in my thesis uses a heteroscedastic LDA to transform data to produce the features the classifier runs on. The HLDA system has a couple parameters I’m testing, and I’m running a 3×2 full factorial experiment. That’s the background which may or may not be relevant to the question. The output of each trial is a class (there are only 2 classes, right now) for every word in the dataset. Because of the nature of the task, one class strongly predominates, say 90-95% of the data. My question is this: in terms of overall performance (we use F1 score), many of these trials are pretty close together, which leads me to ask whethe
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen writes : Texas has begun to enforce [a law regarding parallel parking] only recently . . . Up until now, of course, there has been strong net mobility into the state of Texas, so was the previous lack of enforcement so bad? I care not at all about the direction in which people park their cars and I have no opinion on this law, but I have to raise an alarm at Cowen’s argument here. Let me strip it down to its basic form: 1. Until recently, state X had policy A. 2. Up until now, there has been strong net mobility into state X 3. Therefore, the presumption is that policy A is ok. In this particular case, I think we can safely assume that parallel parking regulations have had close to zero impact on the population flows into and out of Texas. More generally, I think logicians could poke some holes into the argument that 1 and 2 above imply 3. For one thing, you could apply this argument to any policy in any state that’s had positive net migration. Hai
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