andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1901 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: The other day, a friend told me that when he saw me blogging on Noam Chomsky, he was surprised not to see any mention of disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser. I was like, whaaaaaa? I had no idea these two had any connection. In fact, though, they wrote papers together. This made me wonder what Chomsky thought of Hauser’s data scandal. I googled *marc hauser noam chomsky* and the first item that came up was this, from July 2011, reported by Tom Bartlett: I [Bartlett] asked Chomsky for his comment on the Hauser resignation and he e-mailed the following: Mark Hauser is a fine scientist with an outstanding record of accomplishment. His resignation is a serious loss for Harvard, and given the nature of the attack on him, for science generally. Chomsky is a mentor of Hauser so I can’t fault Chomsky for defending the guy. But why couldn’t he have stuck with something more general, something like, “I respect and admire Mark Hauser and am not aware of any improprieties in his w
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1 The other day, a friend told me that when he saw me blogging on Noam Chomsky, he was surprised not to see any mention of disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser. [sent-1, score-0.284]
2 His resignation is a serious loss for Harvard, and given the nature of the attack on him, for science generally. [sent-7, score-0.382]
3 Chomsky is a mentor of Hauser so I can’t fault Chomsky for defending the guy. [sent-8, score-0.191]
4 But why couldn’t he have stuck with something more general, something like, “I respect and admire Mark Hauser and am not aware of any improprieties in his work. [sent-9, score-0.288]
5 ” Or maybe something like, “It is possible that—well, he has published quite a lot in various areas. [sent-10, score-0.102]
6 It’s possible that some of the papers went to press without sufficient rethinking, but I don’t know of any cases. [sent-11, score-0.25]
7 So what happened, that Chomsky changed his tune and got so aggressive? [sent-13, score-0.071]
8 My guess (without any evidence, but, hey, I’m free to guess) is that, as we discussed previously, Chomsky seems to be surrounded mostly by admirers or his haters. [sent-15, score-0.292]
9 The admirers give no useful feedback, and the haters are so clearly against him that he can ignore them. [sent-16, score-0.285]
10 Basically, he lives in a world in which everything is a battle, so it’s hard for him to do nuance. [sent-17, score-0.044]
11 Or, to put it more carefully, he can do nuance, but if he thinks it’s a war going on, he goes into war mode. [sent-18, score-0.23]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1901 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-16-Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad
Introduction: The other day, a friend told me that when he saw me blogging on Noam Chomsky, he was surprised not to see any mention of disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser. I was like, whaaaaaa? I had no idea these two had any connection. In fact, though, they wrote papers together. This made me wonder what Chomsky thought of Hauser’s data scandal. I googled *marc hauser noam chomsky* and the first item that came up was this, from July 2011, reported by Tom Bartlett: I [Bartlett] asked Chomsky for his comment on the Hauser resignation and he e-mailed the following: Mark Hauser is a fine scientist with an outstanding record of accomplishment. His resignation is a serious loss for Harvard, and given the nature of the attack on him, for science generally. Chomsky is a mentor of Hauser so I can’t fault Chomsky for defending the guy. But why couldn’t he have stuck with something more general, something like, “I respect and admire Mark Hauser and am not aware of any improprieties in his w
2 0.56998366 1812 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-19-Chomsky chomsky chomsky chomsky furiously
Introduction: Noam Chomsky elicits a lot of emotional reactions. I’ve talked with some linguists who think Chomsky’s been a real roadblock to research in recent decades. Other linguists love Chomsky, but I think they’re the kind of linguists I wouldn’t spend much time talking with. Many people admire Chomsky’s political activism, but sociologist blogger Fabio Rojas distinguishes “the Chomsky’s of the world who sit around and speechify about the man” from the good guys, “the academics whose work leads to tangible improvements.” When Thomas Basbøll sent me this note, I [Basbøll] wonder if you react in the same (sympathetic) way to these remarks by Chomsky [text here ] as I do. I think he’s right that something happens to research when “applications” come into view. I like his distinction between two conceptions of science, one of which is based on “big data” in which patterns are found by brute information processing, and the other which requires the construction of simple, elegant models
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Introduction: Following up on our recent discussion of combative linguist Noam Chomsky and disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, here are some stories from Jay Livingston about monkey research. Don’t get me wrong—I eat burgers, so I’m not trying to get on my moral high horse here. But the stories do get you thinking about measurement error and why I would not trust the PI of a monkey study to code his own measurements and keep his data secret.
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Introduction: Just in case you didn’t check Retraction Watch yet today , Carolyn Johnson reports: The committee painstakingly reconstructed the process of data analysis and determined that Hauser had changed values, causing the result to be statistically significant, an important criterion showing that findings are probably not due to chance. As the man said : His resignation is a serious loss for Harvard, and given the nature of the attack on him, for science generally. As a statistician, I don’t mind if someone is attacked because of cheating with data. Johnson concludes her news article in a pleasantly balanced way: The committee said it carefully considered Hauser’s allegation that people in his laboratory conspired against him, due to academic rivalry and disgruntlement, but did not find evidence to support the idea. The committee also acknowledged that many of Hauser’s overall findings about the cognitive abilities of animals may stand. His results that showed that animals
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Introduction: Faithful readers will know that my ideal alternative career is to be an editor in the Max Perkins mold. If not that, I think I’d enjoy being a literary essayist, someone like Alfred Kazin or Edmund Wilson or Louis Menand, who could write about my favorite authors and books in a forum where others would read and discuss what I wrote. I could occasionally collect my articles into books, and so on. On the other hand, if I actually had such a career, I wouldn’t have much of an option to do statistical research in my spare time, so I think for my own broader goals, I’ve gotten hold of the right side of the stick. As it is, I enjoy writing about literary matters but it never quite seems worth spending the time to do it right. (And, stepping outside myself, I realize that I have a lot more to offer the world as a statistician than literary critic. Criticism is like musicianship–it can be hard to do, and it’s impressive when done well, but a lot of people can do it. Literary criticism
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Introduction: The other day, a friend told me that when he saw me blogging on Noam Chomsky, he was surprised not to see any mention of disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser. I was like, whaaaaaa? I had no idea these two had any connection. In fact, though, they wrote papers together. This made me wonder what Chomsky thought of Hauser’s data scandal. I googled *marc hauser noam chomsky* and the first item that came up was this, from July 2011, reported by Tom Bartlett: I [Bartlett] asked Chomsky for his comment on the Hauser resignation and he e-mailed the following: Mark Hauser is a fine scientist with an outstanding record of accomplishment. His resignation is a serious loss for Harvard, and given the nature of the attack on him, for science generally. Chomsky is a mentor of Hauser so I can’t fault Chomsky for defending the guy. But why couldn’t he have stuck with something more general, something like, “I respect and admire Mark Hauser and am not aware of any improprieties in his w
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Introduction: Andrew Anthony tells the excellent story of how Nick Brown, Alan Sokal, and Harris Friedman shot down some particularly silly work in psychology. (“According to the graph, it all came down to a specific ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions. If your ratio was greater than 2.9013 positive emotions to 1 negative emotion you were flourishing in life. If your ratio was less than that number you were languishing.” And, yes, the work they were shooting down really is that bad.) If you want to see what the fuss is about, just google “2.9013.” Here’s an example (from 2012) of an uncritical reporting of the claim, here’s another one from 2010, here’s one from 2011 . . . well, you get the idea. And here’s a quick summary posted by Rolf Zwaan after Brown et al. came out with their paper. I know Sokal and Brown and so this story was not news to me. I didn’t post anything about it on this blog because it seemed like it was getting enough coverage elsewhere. I think Ni
Introduction: An offhand mention in this recent post motivated me to google Evilicious. And this is what I found: From the prologue: The idea I [Hauser] develop is that evildoers are made in much the same way that addicts are made. Both processes start with unsatisfied desires. Whether it is a taste for violence or a taste for alcohol, drugs, food, or gambling, individuals develop cravings but find the desired experience less and less rewarding, a separation between desire and reward that leads to excess. To justify the excess, the psychology of desire recruits the psychology of denial, enabling individuals to immerse themselves in a new reality that feels right. Interesting. This could be an excellent book. I imagine that the author has a lot of insight into this psychological state of immersing oneself in a new reality that feels right. Or maybe we all do this. In any case, thinking about extreme evil (what Hauser calls “gratuitous cruelty”) is helpful in developing a sense of pers
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Introduction: Noam Chomsky elicits a lot of emotional reactions. I’ve talked with some linguists who think Chomsky’s been a real roadblock to research in recent decades. Other linguists love Chomsky, but I think they’re the kind of linguists I wouldn’t spend much time talking with. Many people admire Chomsky’s political activism, but sociologist blogger Fabio Rojas distinguishes “the Chomsky’s of the world who sit around and speechify about the man” from the good guys, “the academics whose work leads to tangible improvements.” When Thomas Basbøll sent me this note, I [Basbøll] wonder if you react in the same (sympathetic) way to these remarks by Chomsky [text here ] as I do. I think he’s right that something happens to research when “applications” come into view. I like his distinction between two conceptions of science, one of which is based on “big data” in which patterns are found by brute information processing, and the other which requires the construction of simple, elegant models
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Introduction: I just finished reading an amusing but somewhat disturbing article by Mark Singer, a reporter for the New Yorker who follows in that magazine’s tradition of writing about amiable frauds. (For those who are keeping score at home, Singer employs a McKelway-style relaxed tolerance rather than Liebling-style pyrotechnics.) Singer’s topic was a midwestern dentist named Kip Litton who fradulently invented a side career for himself as a sub-3-hour marathoner. What was amazing was not so much that Litton lied about his accomplishments but, rather, the huge efforts that he undertook to support these lies. He went to faraway cities to not run marathons. He fabricated multiple personas on running message boards. He even invented an entire marathon and made up a list of participants. This got me thinking about Ed Wegman (sorry!), the statistician who got tangled in a series of plagiarism scandals . As with Litton, once Wegman was caught once, energetic people looked at the records and
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Introduction: The other day, a friend told me that when he saw me blogging on Noam Chomsky, he was surprised not to see any mention of disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser. I was like, whaaaaaa? I had no idea these two had any connection. In fact, though, they wrote papers together. This made me wonder what Chomsky thought of Hauser’s data scandal. I googled *marc hauser noam chomsky* and the first item that came up was this, from July 2011, reported by Tom Bartlett: I [Bartlett] asked Chomsky for his comment on the Hauser resignation and he e-mailed the following: Mark Hauser is a fine scientist with an outstanding record of accomplishment. His resignation is a serious loss for Harvard, and given the nature of the attack on him, for science generally. Chomsky is a mentor of Hauser so I can’t fault Chomsky for defending the guy. But why couldn’t he have stuck with something more general, something like, “I respect and admire Mark Hauser and am not aware of any improprieties in his w
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Introduction: Jimmy points me to a sequence of posts (Analyzing Released NYC Value-Added Data Parts 1, 2, 3, 4) by Gary Rubinstein slamming value-added assessment of teachers. A skeptical consensus seems to have arisen on this issue. The teachers groups don’t like the numbers and it seems like none of the reformers trust the numbers enough to defend them. Lots of people like the idea of evaluating teacher performance, but I don’t see anybody out there wanting to seriously defend the numbers that are being pushed out here. P.S. Just to be clear, I’m specifically addressing the problems arising in value assessment of individual teachers. I’m not criticizing the interesting research by Jonah Rockoff and others on the distribution of teacher effects. It’s a lot easier to estimate the distribution of a set of parameters than to estimate the parameters individually.
3 0.77782488 166 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-27-The Three Golden Rules for Successful Scientific Research
Introduction: A famous computer scientist, Edsger W. Dijkstra, was writing short memos on a daily basis for most of his life. His memo archives contains a little over 1300 memos. I guess today he would be writing a blog, although his memos do tend to be slightly more profound than what I post. Here are the rules (follow link for commentary), which I tried to summarize: Pursue quality and challenge, avoid routine. (“Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.”) When pursuing social relevance, never compromise on scientific soundness. (“We all like our work to be socially relevant and scientifically sound. If we can find a topic satisfying both desires, we are lucky; if the two targets are in conflict with each other, let the requirement of scientific sou
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Introduction: I was told about an organization called Reproducibility Initiative. They tell me they are trying to make what was described in our “50 shades of gray” post standard across all of science, particularly areas like cancer research. I don’t know anything else about them, but that sounds like a good start! Here’s the ad: Data Scientist: Science Exchange, Palo Alto, CA Science Exchange is an innovative start-up with a mission to improve the efficiency and quality of scientific research. This Data Science position is critical to our mission. Our ideal candidate has the ability to collect and normalize data from multiple sources. This information will be used to drive marketing and product decisions, as well as fuel many of the features of Science Exchange. Desired Skills & Experience Experience with text mining, entity extraction and natural language processing is essential Experience scripting with either Python or R Experience running complex statistical analyses on l
5 0.70516628 2119 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-01-Separated by a common blah blah blah
Introduction: I love reading the kind of English that English people write. It’s the same language as American but just slightly different. I was thinking about this recently after coming across this footnote from “Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop,” by Bob Stanley: Mantovani’s atmospheric arrangement on ‘Care Mia’, I should add, is something else. Genuinely celestial. If anyone with a degree of subtlety was singing, it would be quite a record. It’s hard for me to pin down exactly what makes this passage specifically English, but there’s something about it . . . P.S. Mark Liberman reports that, in combination, several of the words and phrases in the above quote indeed supply strong evidence (“odds of better than 50 to 1 in favor of a British origin”).
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