andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1921 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Ashok Rao shreds the latest book from Niall Ferguson, who we’ve encountered most recently as the source of homophobic slurs but who used to be a serious scholar . Or maybe still is. Remember Linda, that character from the Kahneman and Tversky vignette who was deemed likely to be “a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement”? Maybe Ferguson is a serious scholar who is active in the being-a-hack movement. Perhaps when he’s not writing books where he distorts his sources, or giving lectures with unfortunate slurs, he’s doing historical research. It’s certainly possible. Rao describes how Ferguson distorts his source materials. This is a no-no for any historian, of course, but not such a surprise for Ferguson, who crossed over the John Yoo line awhile ago. Last year I wrote about the paradox of influence: Ferguson gets and keeps the big-money audience by telling them not what he (Ferguson) wants to say—not by giving them his unique insights and understanding—but rat
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1 Ashok Rao shreds the latest book from Niall Ferguson, who we’ve encountered most recently as the source of homophobic slurs but who used to be a serious scholar . [sent-1, score-0.16]
2 Remember Linda, that character from the Kahneman and Tversky vignette who was deemed likely to be “a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement”? [sent-3, score-0.1]
3 Maybe Ferguson is a serious scholar who is active in the being-a-hack movement. [sent-4, score-0.112]
4 Perhaps when he’s not writing books where he distorts his sources, or giving lectures with unfortunate slurs, he’s doing historical research. [sent-5, score-0.203]
5 Last year I wrote about the paradox of influence: Ferguson gets and keeps the big-money audience by telling them not what he (Ferguson) wants to say—not by giving them his unique insights and understanding—but rather by telling his audience what they want to hear. [sent-9, score-0.278]
6 Therefore, it is fair to assume Ferguson does not expect his audience to have read the papers cited throughout. [sent-13, score-0.143]
7 Take a look for yourself: The reader is led to believe that the five listed reasons are at or near the top of a such list created by Porter and his team. [sent-28, score-0.34]
8 The tax system, is sixth down the list and cannot in any way be considered primary. [sent-31, score-0.216]
9 Ferguson give a numbered list of 5 reasons, which happens not to include any of the top five from the cited article. [sent-37, score-0.308]
10 And actually Ferguson’s list doesn’t even hit item #6 very accurately (as he translates “lower tax rates” into “the complexity of the tax code”). [sent-39, score-0.382]
11 The error seems too big for him to say it was a simple transposition or slip on the part of a research assistant. [sent-43, score-0.102]
12 First, he’d attack the messenger and say that Rao is a political opponent. [sent-45, score-0.115]
13 Such a reaction would seem irrelevant to me—yes, Rao is an opponent of Ferguson’s political positions, but the evidence seems clear that Ferguson is misrepresenting that study. [sent-46, score-0.108]
14 If you agree with the guy, you feel his heart is in the right place, and what’s the big deal if he moves a few facts around and violates the stuffy conventions of documentary film or scholarly writing? [sent-49, score-0.233]
15 And who cares what the haters say, they’re nobodies compared to an Academy-Award-winning top-grossing film producer or a Hoover Institution professor whose lecture fees are in the high five figures and is friends with Henry Kissinger? [sent-51, score-0.279]
16 And, indeed, if you agree with Ferguson on the big picture, maybe the details really don’t matter. [sent-55, score-0.104]
17 What really amazes me about Ferguson is that at this point he really doesn’t seem to care about scholarly norms. [sent-56, score-0.155]
18 As I wrote last year, when I’m describing someone as a hack, I’m not saying he’s political or that he’s writing something I disagree with. [sent-68, score-0.132]
19 I feel that much of his recent writing is at worst a violation of scholarly ethics (as above) and is at best laughable and empty (as here ), and I am repulsed by his crude attempt to get laughs by alluding to poof-like characteristics of historical figures. [sent-78, score-0.32]
20 But I recognize that he feels he has a larger purpose; I assume he really does believe that it’s 1973 and the Western world is being crushed by its business-unfriendly political environment, and that the crisis is real enough that it’s worth destroying one’s scholarly reputation to address. [sent-79, score-0.171]
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Introduction: Ashok Rao shreds the latest book from Niall Ferguson, who we’ve encountered most recently as the source of homophobic slurs but who used to be a serious scholar . Or maybe still is. Remember Linda, that character from the Kahneman and Tversky vignette who was deemed likely to be “a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement”? Maybe Ferguson is a serious scholar who is active in the being-a-hack movement. Perhaps when he’s not writing books where he distorts his sources, or giving lectures with unfortunate slurs, he’s doing historical research. It’s certainly possible. Rao describes how Ferguson distorts his source materials. This is a no-no for any historian, of course, but not such a surprise for Ferguson, who crossed over the John Yoo line awhile ago. Last year I wrote about the paradox of influence: Ferguson gets and keeps the big-money audience by telling them not what he (Ferguson) wants to say—not by giving them his unique insights and understanding—but rat
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Introduction: Life is continuous but we think in discrete terms. In applied statistics there’s the p=.05 line which tells us whether a finding is significant or not. Baseball has the Mendoza line. And academia has what might be called the John Yoo line : the point at which nothing you write gets taken seriously, and so you might as well become a hack because you have no scholarly reputation remaining. John Yoo, of course, became a hack because, I assume, he had nothing left to lose. In contrast, historian Niall Ferguson has reportedly been moved to hackery because he has so much to gain . At least that is the analysis of Stephen Marche ( link from Basbøll): Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent’s Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. . . . Tha
Introduction: We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and marrying a ballerina and talking about poetry. The general idea, I think, is that people without kids don’t care so much about the future, and this motivated Keynes’s party-all-the-time attitude, which might have worked just fine for Eddie Murphy’s girlfriend in the 1980s and in San Francisco bathhouses of the 1970s but, according to Ferguson, is not the ticket for preserving today’s American empire. Some of the more robust defenders of Ferguson may have been disappointed by his followup remarks: “I should not have suggested . . . that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was g
Introduction: I don’t want this to be a regular feature but I wanted to briefly comment on Ferguson’s open letter regarding the Keynes-was-a-ballet-and-poetry-loving-poof remarks he made the other day at that conference of financial advisors. (I’m posting this one at night, and a new post on an unrelated topic is coming in the morning, so I’m burying it as much as possible.) Ferguson reiterates that his remarks were “stupid.” The question then arises: He’s a smart guy, how did he end up saying such stupid things? Ferguson has a history of saying high-profile stupid things, and they always seem to be when he’s trying to make some sort of political point. I’m still going with my theory that Ferguson misjudged his audience; he thought they’d appreciate an anti-Keynes remark, maybe he even thought they were the kind of crowd that would enjoy cracks about gay people who like ballet and poetry. No go. Again, I’m not trying to nail the guy to the cross for this. We all make mistakes; in fact
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Introduction: History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports : Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated. . . . Ferguson . . . says it’s only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an “effete” member of society. . . . Throughout his remarks, Ferguson referred to his “friends” in high places. They should all be embarrassed and ashamed of such a connection to such small-minded thinking. Ferguson says U.S. laws and institutions have become degenerate. Acc
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Introduction: We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and marrying a ballerina and talking about poetry. The general idea, I think, is that people without kids don’t care so much about the future, and this motivated Keynes’s party-all-the-time attitude, which might have worked just fine for Eddie Murphy’s girlfriend in the 1980s and in San Francisco bathhouses of the 1970s but, according to Ferguson, is not the ticket for preserving today’s American empire. Some of the more robust defenders of Ferguson may have been disappointed by his followup remarks: “I should not have suggested . . . that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was g
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