andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1863 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: This isn’t quite right—poetry, too, can be in paragraph form (see Auden, for example, or Frost, or lots of other examples)—but Basbøll is on to something here. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s hilarious “From the Index of First Lines,” which is truly the poetic counterpart to Basbøll’s argument in prose:
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1 This isn’t quite right—poetry, too, can be in paragraph form (see Auden, for example, or Frost, or lots of other examples)—but Basbøll is on to something here. [sent-1, score-0.551]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1863 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-19-Prose is paragraphs, prose is sentences
Introduction: This isn’t quite right—poetry, too, can be in paragraph form (see Auden, for example, or Frost, or lots of other examples)—but Basbøll is on to something here. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s hilarious “From the Index of First Lines,” which is truly the poetic counterpart to Basbøll’s argument in prose:
2 0.20550679 1269 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-19-Believe your models (up to the point that you abandon them)
Introduction: In a discussion of his variant of the write-a-thousand-words-a-day strategy (as he puts it, “a system for the production of academic results in writing”), Thomas Basbøll writes : Believe the claims you are making. That is, confine yourself to making claims you believe. I always emphasize this when I [Basbøll] define knowledge as “justified, true belief”. . . . I think if there is one sure way to undermine your sense of your own genius it is to begin to say things you know to be publishable without being sure they are true. Or even things you know to be “true” but don’t understand well enough to believe. He points out that this is not so easy: In times when there are strong orthodoxies it can sometimes be difficult to know what to believe. Or, rather, it is all too easy to know what to believe (what the “right belief” is). It is therefore difficult to stick to statements of one’s own belief. I sometimes worry that our universities, which are systems of formal education and for
3 0.20361815 1658 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-07-Free advice from an academic writing coach!
Introduction: Basbøll writes : I [Basbøll] have got to come up with forty things to say [in the next few months]. . . . What would you like me to write about? I’ll of course be writing quite a bit about what I’m now calling “article design”, i.e., how to map out the roughly forty paragraphs that a journal article is composed of. And I’ll also be talking about how to plan the writing process that is to produce those paragraphs. The basic principle is still to write at least one paragraph a day in 27 minutes. (You can adapt this is various ways to your own taste; some like 18-minute or even 13-minute paragraphs.) But I’d like to talk about questions of style, too, and even a little bit about epistemology. “Knowledge—academic knowledge, that is—is the ability to compose a coherent prose paragraph about something in 27 minutes,” I always say. I’d like to reflect a little more about what this conception of knowledge really means. This means I’ll have to walk back my recent dismissal of epistemol
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Introduction: Thomas Basbøll writes : [Advertising executive] Russell Davies wrote a blog post called “The Tyranny of the Big Idea”. His five-point procedure begins: Start doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often. Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and do it differently. And ends with: “And something else and something else.” This inspires several thoughts, which I’ll take advantage of the blog format to present with no attempt to be cohesively organized. 1. My first concern is the extent to which productivity-enhancing advice such as Davies’s (and Basbøll’s) is zero or even negative-sum , just helping people in the rat race. But, upon reflection, I’d rate the recommendations as positive-sum. If people learn to write better and be more productive, that’s not (necessarily) just positional. 2. Blogging fits with the “Do it quickly and do it often” advice. 3. I wonder what Basbøll thinks abo
5 0.13349943 1351 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-29-A Ph.D. thesis is not really a marathon
Introduction: Thomas Basbøll writes : A blog called The Thesis Whisperer was recently pointed out to me. I [Basbøll] haven’t looked at it closely, but I’ll be reading it regularly for a while before I recommend it. I’m sure it’s a good place to go to discover that you’re not alone, especially when you’re struggling with your dissertation. One post caught my eye immediately. It suggested that writing a thesis is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. As a metaphorical adjustment to a particular attitude about writing, it’s probably going to help some people. But if we think it through, it’s not really a very good analogy. No one is really a “sprinter”; and writing a dissertation is nothing like running a marathon. . . . Here’s Ben’s explication of the analogy at the Thesis Whisperer, which seems initially plausible. …writing a dissertation is a lot like running a marathon. They are both endurance events, they last a long time and they require a consistent and carefully calculated amount of effor
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16 0.083659485 2284 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-07-How literature is like statistical reasoning: Kosara on stories. Gelman and Basbøll on stories.
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18 0.073091187 1278 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-23-“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”
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same-blog 1 0.96720159 1863 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-19-Prose is paragraphs, prose is sentences
Introduction: This isn’t quite right—poetry, too, can be in paragraph form (see Auden, for example, or Frost, or lots of other examples)—but Basbøll is on to something here. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s hilarious “From the Index of First Lines,” which is truly the poetic counterpart to Basbøll’s argument in prose:
2 0.80269086 1408 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-07-Not much difference between communicating to self and communicating to others
Introduction: Thomas Basbøll writes : [Advertising executive] Russell Davies wrote a blog post called “The Tyranny of the Big Idea”. His five-point procedure begins: Start doing stuff. Start executing things which seem right. Do it quickly and do it often. Don’t cling onto anything, good or bad. Don’t repeat much. Take what was good and do it differently. And ends with: “And something else and something else.” This inspires several thoughts, which I’ll take advantage of the blog format to present with no attempt to be cohesively organized. 1. My first concern is the extent to which productivity-enhancing advice such as Davies’s (and Basbøll’s) is zero or even negative-sum , just helping people in the rat race. But, upon reflection, I’d rate the recommendations as positive-sum. If people learn to write better and be more productive, that’s not (necessarily) just positional. 2. Blogging fits with the “Do it quickly and do it often” advice. 3. I wonder what Basbøll thinks abo
3 0.77720463 1269 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-19-Believe your models (up to the point that you abandon them)
Introduction: In a discussion of his variant of the write-a-thousand-words-a-day strategy (as he puts it, “a system for the production of academic results in writing”), Thomas Basbøll writes : Believe the claims you are making. That is, confine yourself to making claims you believe. I always emphasize this when I [Basbøll] define knowledge as “justified, true belief”. . . . I think if there is one sure way to undermine your sense of your own genius it is to begin to say things you know to be publishable without being sure they are true. Or even things you know to be “true” but don’t understand well enough to believe. He points out that this is not so easy: In times when there are strong orthodoxies it can sometimes be difficult to know what to believe. Or, rather, it is all too easy to know what to believe (what the “right belief” is). It is therefore difficult to stick to statements of one’s own belief. I sometimes worry that our universities, which are systems of formal education and for
4 0.76229405 1602 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-The purpose of writing
Introduction: Basbøll : My aim is Socratic. I don’t want to help you become more knowledgeable. I want to help you better distinguish what you know from what you don’t know. Excellent point. Indeed, laying out what I do know and tracing the boundary of my ignorance, that’s what writing is all about for me.
5 0.75548017 1658 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-07-Free advice from an academic writing coach!
Introduction: Basbøll writes : I [Basbøll] have got to come up with forty things to say [in the next few months]. . . . What would you like me to write about? I’ll of course be writing quite a bit about what I’m now calling “article design”, i.e., how to map out the roughly forty paragraphs that a journal article is composed of. And I’ll also be talking about how to plan the writing process that is to produce those paragraphs. The basic principle is still to write at least one paragraph a day in 27 minutes. (You can adapt this is various ways to your own taste; some like 18-minute or even 13-minute paragraphs.) But I’d like to talk about questions of style, too, and even a little bit about epistemology. “Knowledge—academic knowledge, that is—is the ability to compose a coherent prose paragraph about something in 27 minutes,” I always say. I’d like to reflect a little more about what this conception of knowledge really means. This means I’ll have to walk back my recent dismissal of epistemol
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same-blog 1 0.85956192 1863 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-19-Prose is paragraphs, prose is sentences
Introduction: This isn’t quite right—poetry, too, can be in paragraph form (see Auden, for example, or Frost, or lots of other examples)—but Basbøll is on to something here. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s hilarious “From the Index of First Lines,” which is truly the poetic counterpart to Basbøll’s argument in prose:
2 0.83634567 1778 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-27-My talk at the University of Michigan today 4pm
Introduction: Causality and Statistical Learning Andrew Gelman, Statistics and Political Science, Columbia University Wed 27 Mar, 4pm, Betty Ford Auditorium, Ford School of Public Policy Causal inference is central to the social and biomedical sciences. There are unresolved debates about the meaning of causality and the methods that should be used to measure it. As a statistician, I am trained to say that randomized experiments are a gold standard, yet I have spent almost all my applied career analyzing observational data. In this talk we shall consider various approaches to causal reasoning from the perspective of an applied statistician who recognizes the importance of causal identification yet must learn from available information. Two relevant papers are here and here .
3 0.76420009 356 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-20-Ranking on crime rankings
Introduction: Following up on our discussion of crime rates–surprisingly (to me), Detroit’s violent crime rate was only 75% more than Minneapolis’s–Chris Uggen pointed me to this warning from Richard Rosenfeld and Janet Lauritsen about comparative crime stats.
4 0.76355356 2192 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-30-History is too important to be left to the history professors, Part 2
Introduction: Completely non-gay historian Niall Ferguson, a man who we can be sure would never be caught at a ballet or a poetry reading, informs us that the British decision to enter the first world war on the side of France and Belgium was “the biggest error in modern history.” Ummm, here are a few bigger errors: The German decision to invade Russia in 1941. The Japanese decision to attack America in 1941. Oh yeah , the German decision to invade Belgium in 1914. The Russian decision to invade Afghanistan in 1981 doesn’t look like such a great decision either. And it wasn’t so smart for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, but maybe the countries involved were too small for this to count as “the biggest error in modern history.” It’s striking that, in considering the biggest error in modern history, Ferguson omits all these notorious acts of aggression (bombing Pearl Harbor, leading to the destruction of much of your country, that was pretty bad, huh?), and decides that the worst
5 0.75757277 1127 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-18-The Fixie Bike Index
Introduction: Where are the fixed-gear bike riders? Rohin Dhar explains : At Priceonomics, in order to build our bicycle price guide, we measure what kind of used bikes people are trying to sell and the quantity sold in any city. By mining our database of 1.3 million bicycle listings, we can tell what are the largest markets for used bicycles, how the prices vary by region, and where people who prize fixed gear bikes live. Fixies (fixed gear bikes) are considered to be a strong indicator of hipsterness. For those unfamiliar, a fixed gear bike requires riding in a single gear and the only way to stop the bike is to pedal backwards to help skid the bike to a halt. You can’t “coast” on a fixie; when you are biking downhill, your pedals will keep moving so you better keep pedaling too. Because of the minimalism of this fixed gear system, the bikes tend to be aesthetically pleasing but somewhat challenging to ride. . . . In short, fixed gear bikes = hipsters, and New York boroug
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