andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1827 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Upon reading this note by John Cook on continued fractions, I wrote: If you like continued fractions, I recommend you read the relevant parts of the classic Numerical Methods That Work. The details are probably obsolete but it’s fun reading (at least, if you think that sort of thing is fun to read). I then looked up Acton in Wikipedia and was surprised to see he’s still alive. And he wrote a second book (published at the age of 77!). I wonder if it’s any good. It’s sobering to read Numerical Methods That Work: it’s so wonderful and so readable, yet in this modern era there’s really not much reason to read it. Perhaps William Goldman (hey, I checked: he’s still alive too!) or some equivalent could prepare a 50-page “good parts” version that could be still be useful as a basic textbook.
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1 Upon reading this note by John Cook on continued fractions, I wrote: If you like continued fractions, I recommend you read the relevant parts of the classic Numerical Methods That Work. [sent-1, score-1.534]
2 The details are probably obsolete but it’s fun reading (at least, if you think that sort of thing is fun to read). [sent-2, score-0.916]
3 I then looked up Acton in Wikipedia and was surprised to see he’s still alive. [sent-3, score-0.326]
4 And he wrote a second book (published at the age of 77! [sent-4, score-0.322]
5 It’s sobering to read Numerical Methods That Work: it’s so wonderful and so readable, yet in this modern era there’s really not much reason to read it. [sent-7, score-1.143]
6 Perhaps William Goldman (hey, I checked: he’s still alive too! [sent-8, score-0.3]
7 ) or some equivalent could prepare a 50-page “good parts” version that could be still be useful as a basic textbook. [sent-9, score-0.782]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1827 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-27-Continued fractions!!
Introduction: Upon reading this note by John Cook on continued fractions, I wrote: If you like continued fractions, I recommend you read the relevant parts of the classic Numerical Methods That Work. The details are probably obsolete but it’s fun reading (at least, if you think that sort of thing is fun to read). I then looked up Acton in Wikipedia and was surprised to see he’s still alive. And he wrote a second book (published at the age of 77!). I wonder if it’s any good. It’s sobering to read Numerical Methods That Work: it’s so wonderful and so readable, yet in this modern era there’s really not much reason to read it. Perhaps William Goldman (hey, I checked: he’s still alive too!) or some equivalent could prepare a 50-page “good parts” version that could be still be useful as a basic textbook.
2 0.10341382 738 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Works well versus well understood
Introduction: John Cook discusses the John Tukey quote, “The test of a good procedure is how well it works, not how well it is understood.” Cook writes: At some level, it’s hard to argue against this. Statistical procedures operate on empirical data, so it makes sense that the procedures themselves be evaluated empirically. But I [Cook] question whether we really know that a statistical procedure works well if it isn’t well understood. Specifically, I’m skeptical of complex statistical methods whose only credentials are a handful of simulations. “We don’t have any theoretical results, buy hey, it works well in practice. Just look at the simulations.” Every method works well on the scenarios its author publishes, almost by definition. If the method didn’t handle a scenario well, the author would publish a different scenario. I agree with Cook but would give a slightly different emphasis. I’d say that a lot of methods can work when they are done well. See the second meta-principle liste
Introduction: Eric Tassone writes: Probably not blog-worthy/blog-appropriate, but have you heard Bill James discussing the Sandusky & Paterno stuff? I think you discussed once his stance on the Dowd Report, and this seems to be from the same part of his personality—which goes beyond contrarian . . . I have in fact blogged on James ( many times ) and on Paterno , so yes I think this is blogworthy. On the other hand, most readers of this blog probably don’t care about baseball, football, or William James, so I’ll put the rest below the fold. What is legendary baseball statistician Bill James doing, defending the crime-coverups of legendary coach Joe Paterno? As I wrote in my earlier blog on Paterno, it isn’t always easy to do the right thing, and I have no idea if I’d behave any better if I were in such a situation. The characteristics of a good coach do not necessarily provide what it takes to make good decisions off the field. In this sense even more of the blame should go
4 0.090778872 1832 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The blogroll
Introduction: I encourage you to check out our linked blogs . Here’s what they’re all about: Cognitive and Behavioral Science BPS Research Digest : I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it more often. There are a couple things that bother me, though. The blog is sponsored by the British Psychological Society, so this sounds pretty serious. But then they run things like advertising promotions sponsored by a textbook company and highlight iffy experimental claims. For example, in 2010 they ran a wholly uncritical post on the notorious Daryl Bem study that purported to find ESP. After being called on it in the comments, the blogger (Christian Jarrett) responded with, “The stats appear sound. . . . it’s a great study. Rigorously conducted” and even defended “the discussion of quantum physics in the paper.” To be fair, though, and as he points out in comments, Jarrett wrote of Bem’s study: “this isn’t proof of psi, far fr
5 0.09054552 1843 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-05-The New York Times Book of Mathematics
Introduction: This was an good idea: take a bunch of old (and some recent) news articles on developments in mathematics and related ares from the past hundred years. Fun for the math content and historical/nostalgia value. Relive the four-color theorem, Fermat, fractals, and early computing. I have too much of a technical bent to be the ideal reader for this sort of book, but it seems like an excellent gift for a non-technical reader who nonetheless enjoys math. (I assume that such people are out there, just as there are people like me who can’t read music but still enjoy reading about the subject.) The book is organized by topic. My own preference would have been chronological and with more old stuff. I particularly enjoyed the material from many decades ago, such as the news report on one of the early computers. This must have been a fun book to compile.
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20 0.072798625 499 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-03-5 books
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same-blog 1 0.98122329 1827 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-27-Continued fractions!!
Introduction: Upon reading this note by John Cook on continued fractions, I wrote: If you like continued fractions, I recommend you read the relevant parts of the classic Numerical Methods That Work. The details are probably obsolete but it’s fun reading (at least, if you think that sort of thing is fun to read). I then looked up Acton in Wikipedia and was surprised to see he’s still alive. And he wrote a second book (published at the age of 77!). I wonder if it’s any good. It’s sobering to read Numerical Methods That Work: it’s so wonderful and so readable, yet in this modern era there’s really not much reason to read it. Perhaps William Goldman (hey, I checked: he’s still alive too!) or some equivalent could prepare a 50-page “good parts” version that could be still be useful as a basic textbook.
2 0.81270337 1977 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-11-Debutante Hill
Introduction: I was curious so I ordered a used copy. It was pretty good. It fit in my pocket and I read it on the plane. It was written in a bland, spare manner, not worth reading for any direct insights it would give into human nature, but the plot moved along. And the background material was interesting in the window it gave into the society of the 1950s. It was fun to read a book of pulp fiction that didn’t have any dead bodies in it. I wonder what Jenny Davidson would think of it.
3 0.80517685 285 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-18-Fiction is not for tirades? Tell that to Saul Bellow!
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links approvingly to this review by B. R. Myers of a book that I haven’t read. Unlike Cowen, I haven’t seen the book in question–so far, I’ve only read the excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker–but I can say that I found Myers’s review very annoying. Myers writes: The same narrator who gives us “sucked” and “very into” also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang. . . . But if Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. . . . Are we to chuckle at the adult woman for writing this in seriousness, or is she mocking her younger self, the teenage ra
4 0.80337876 30 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-13-Trips to Cleveland
Introduction: Helen DeWitt writes about The Ask, the new book by Sam Lipsyte, author of a hilarious book I read a couple years ago about a loser guy who goes to his high school reunion. I haven’t read Lipsyte’s new book but was interested to see that he teaches at Columbia. Perhaps I can take him to lunch (either before or after I work up the courage to call Gary Shteyngart and ask him about my theory that the main character of that book is a symbol of modern-day America). In any case, in the grand tradition of reviewing the review, I have some thoughts inspired by DeWitt, who quotes from this interview : LRS: I was studying writing at college and then this professor showed up, a disciple of Gordon Lish, and we operated according to the Lish method. You start reading your work and then as soon as you hit a false note she made you stop. Lipsyte: Yeah, Lish would say, “That’s bullshit!” If they did this for statistics articles, I think they’d rarely get past the abstract, most of the ti
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Introduction: I was stunned this from Jenny Davidson about mystery writers: The crime fiction community is smart and adult and welcoming, and so many good books are being written (Lee Child was mentioning his peer group – i.e. they were the new kids around the same tie – being Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman – the list speaks for itself) . . . Why was I stunned? Because just a few days earlier I had a look at a book by Robert Crais. It just happened that Phil, when he was visiting, had finished this book (which he described as “pretty good”) and left it with me so he wouldn’t have to take it back with him. I’d never heard of Crais, but it had pretty amazing blurbs on the cover and Phil recommended it, so I took a look. It was bad. From page 1 it was bad. It was like a bad cop show. I could see the seams where the sentences were stitched together. I could see how somebody might like this sort of book, but I certainly can’t understand the blurbs or the i
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen hypothesizes a “dogmatism portfolio” or a “quota of dogmatism”: in his words, If you’re very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. OK, well “may be” is pretty vague. There’s not really anything to disagree with, yet. But then Cowen continues: There’s a lesson here. If you wish to be a more open-minded thinker, adhere to some extreme and perhaps unreasonable fandoms, the more firmly believed the better and the more obscure the area the better. This will help fulfill your dogmatism quota, yet without much skewing your more important beliefs. He seems to be making a testable prediction here, that levels of dogmatism on two randomly chosen issues should be negatively correlated. I guess I should call this “almost testable,” as it still requires an issue-by-issue measure of dogmatism. (Is it dogmatic to believe that there was this guy called Jesus who walked on water . . . or is it dogmatic to say that Jesus didn’t walk on water and
same-blog 2 0.9490903 1827 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-27-Continued fractions!!
Introduction: Upon reading this note by John Cook on continued fractions, I wrote: If you like continued fractions, I recommend you read the relevant parts of the classic Numerical Methods That Work. The details are probably obsolete but it’s fun reading (at least, if you think that sort of thing is fun to read). I then looked up Acton in Wikipedia and was surprised to see he’s still alive. And he wrote a second book (published at the age of 77!). I wonder if it’s any good. It’s sobering to read Numerical Methods That Work: it’s so wonderful and so readable, yet in this modern era there’s really not much reason to read it. Perhaps William Goldman (hey, I checked: he’s still alive too!) or some equivalent could prepare a 50-page “good parts” version that could be still be useful as a basic textbook.
3 0.93374515 646 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Graphical insights into the safety of cycling.
Introduction: This article by Thomas Crag, at Copenhagenize, is marred by reliance on old data, but it’s so full of informative graphical displays — most of them not made by the author, I think — that it’s hard to pick just one. But here ya go. This figure shows fatalities (among cyclists) versus distance cycled, with a point for each year…unfortunately ending in way back in 1998, but still: This is a good alternative to the more common choice for this sort of plot, which would be overlaying curves of fatalities vs time and distance cycled vs time. The article also explicitly discusses the fact, previously discussed on this blog , that it’s misleading, to the point of being wrong in most contexts, to compare the safety of walking vs cycling vs driving by looking at the casualty or fatality rate per kilometer . Often, as in this article, the question of interest is something like, if more people switched from driving to cycling, how many more or fewer people would die? Obviously, if peo
4 0.92344773 1444 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-05-Those darn conservative egalitarians
Introduction: Nadia Hassan writes: In your review of the Jacobs and Page book, you argued that while there was an open question of whether government could give voters what they wanted in light of the tax increases they might accept, Jacobs and Page were pretty persuasive about targeted tax hikes and specific programs especially against the freeloader view. Recent discussions, and some focus groups bear out these points exactly. The link is from a report by Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert. I suppose if you ask Doug Schoen to make up some data, you’ll get a different story.
5 0.9229843 805 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-16-Hey–here’s what you missed in the past 30 days!
Introduction: OK, the 30 days of statistics are over. I’ll still be posting regularly on statistical topics, but now it will be mixed in with everything else, as before. Here’s what I put on the sister blogs in the past month: 1. How to write an entire report with fake data. 2. “Life getting shorter for women in hundreds of U.S. counties”: I’d like to see a graph of relative change in death rates, with age on the x-axis. 3. “Not a choice” != “genetic” . 4. Remember when I said I’d never again post on albedo? I was lying . 5. Update on Arrow’s theorem. It’s a Swiss thing , you wouldn’t understand. 6. Dan Ariely can’t read, but don’t blame Johnson and Goldstein. 7. My co-blogger endorses college scholarships for bowling . Which reminds me that my friends and I did “intramural bowling” in high school to get out of going to gym class. Nobody paid us. We even had to rent the shoes! 8. The quest for http://www.freakonomics.com/2008/10/10/my-colleague-casey-mu
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