andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1935 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . . . Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. . . . When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route—always, I’m ethical—but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove . . . In the end, experts they consider themselves to be, people are a tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses. I take a lot of rides to and from the airport, and I can assure you that a lot of taxi drivers don’t know the good routes. Once I had to start screaming from the back seat to stop the guy from getting on the BQE. I don’t “pride myself” on knowing a good route home from the airport, but I prefer the good route. I’m guessing that the taxi driver quoted above is subject to the same illusions
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . [sent-1, score-2.0]
2 Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. [sent-4, score-1.012]
3 When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route—always, I’m ethical—but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove . [sent-8, score-1.124]
4 In the end, experts they consider themselves to be, people are a tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses. [sent-11, score-0.68]
5 I take a lot of rides to and from the airport, and I can assure you that a lot of taxi drivers don’t know the good routes. [sent-12, score-0.84]
6 Once I had to start screaming from the back seat to stop the guy from getting on the BQE. [sent-13, score-0.339]
7 I don’t “pride myself” on knowing a good route home from the airport, but I prefer the good route. [sent-14, score-0.79]
8 I’m guessing that the taxi driver quoted above is subject to the same illusions that we all encounter, as described in his last sentence. [sent-15, score-0.922]
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same-blog 1 0.99999982 1935 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-12-“A tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses”
Introduction: Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . . . Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. . . . When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route—always, I’m ethical—but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove . . . In the end, experts they consider themselves to be, people are a tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses. I take a lot of rides to and from the airport, and I can assure you that a lot of taxi drivers don’t know the good routes. Once I had to start screaming from the back seat to stop the guy from getting on the BQE. I don’t “pride myself” on knowing a good route home from the airport, but I prefer the good route. I’m guessing that the taxi driver quoted above is subject to the same illusions
2 0.12856162 1453 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-10-Quotes from me!
Introduction: When linking to my review of Duncan Watts’s book in a recent post, I came across some fun bits that I’d like to share (for those of you who didn’t just click through and read the whole thing): On business books: I’m not so interested in the business angle but I suppose that’s how you sell books these days. The business part of the book was ok—I’m not saying it was filler—it’s just that I’m not particularly interested in which format of videocassette wins, or whether Cisco Systems is a well-run company. I realize that a lot of people care about this sort of things nowadays, but I’d rather talk about sports or politics. On dodgy science writer John Gribbin: Sure, people write all sorts of silly things but usually they have some sort of political or religious excuse for why it’s ok to believe them. Truth is not the only important value in life, there are also other concerns such as political convictions, religious beliefs, and the simple desire to avoid offending people. Thus
3 0.10885094 1780 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-28-Racism!
Introduction: I was reading a book of Alfred Kazin’s letters—I don’t know if they’d be so interesting to someone who hadn’t already read a bunch of his stuff , but I found them pretty interesting—and came across this amazing bit, dated August 11, 1957: No, really, Al. Tell us what you really feel. This was in his private diary, so I can’t really criticize him for it. And all of us have private thoughts, sometimes publicly expressed, that are unworthy of our better self. For example, once I was crossing a street and a taxi driver came dangerously close, and I screamed at him, “Go back to your own country, you #&@#%*^&.” So I’m not claiming that I’m any better than Kazin. I just thought that quote was pretty amazing. I guess that’s how (some) people thought, back in the fifties. Also interesting that he wrote “ass-hole” in that context. The hyphen surprised me, also I don’t think people would use that word in this way anymore. Nowadays I think of an asshole as a person, not a place.
4 0.10128544 2134 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-14-Oswald evidence
Introduction: Aaron Edlin writes: This story is interesting in its own right . . . I have a question so I thought I would ask a Bayesian statistician. One fact I learned on reading this article is that Oswald had a job in the building that Kennedy drove by before Kennedy’s route was chosen. So Oswald didn’t get the job to shoot Kennedy. Does this “prove” there was no conspiracy or indeed have any bearing on the likelihood of that inference? My reply: I actually have a friend whose father worked on the Warren Commission so I’ve long been convinced that Oswald acted alone. But, sure, this piece of information should shift the probability a bit. The difficulty is that the amount (and even the direction) of the shifting of the probability depends on the model you are assuming for various possibilities, and these possibilities themselves are not so clearly defined. Bayesian statistician Jay Kadane wrote a book a few years ago on the Sacco and Vanzetti case, going into the evidence supplie
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Introduction: Alex Braunstein writes: Thanks for the post . You drove >800 pageviews to my site. That’s >90% of what Robert Scoble’s tweet generated with 184k followers, which I find incredibly impressive. 800 doesn’t sound like so much to me, but I suppose if it’s the right 800 . . .
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same-blog 1 0.95376366 1935 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-12-“A tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses”
Introduction: Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . . . Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. . . . When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route—always, I’m ethical—but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove . . . In the end, experts they consider themselves to be, people are a tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses. I take a lot of rides to and from the airport, and I can assure you that a lot of taxi drivers don’t know the good routes. Once I had to start screaming from the back seat to stop the guy from getting on the BQE. I don’t “pride myself” on knowing a good route home from the airport, but I prefer the good route. I’m guessing that the taxi driver quoted above is subject to the same illusions
Introduction: Ever since I got this new sound system for my bike, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. This American Life is really good. I know, I know, everybody knows that, but it’s true. The only segments I don’t like are the ones that are too “writerly,” when they read a short story aloud. They don’t work for me. Most of the time, though, the show is as great as everyone says it is. Anyway, the other day I listened to program #466: Blackjack . It started with some items on card counting. That stuff is always fun. Then they get to the longer story, which is all about a moderately rich housewife from Iowa who, over a roughly ten-year period, lost her life savings, something like a million dollars, at Harrah’s casinos. Did you know they had casinos in Iowa and Indiana? I didn’t. Anyway, the lady was a gambling addict. That part’s pretty clear. You don’t lose your life savings at a casino by accident. The scary part, though, was how the casino company craftily enabled her to
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Introduction: Appointed “inflation czar” in late 1970s, Alfred Kahn is most famous for deregulating the airline industry. At the time this seemed to make sense, although in retrospect I’m less a fan of consumer-driven policies than I used to be. When I was a kid we subscribed to Consumer Reports and so I just assumed that everything that was good for the consumer–lower prices, better products, etc.–was a good thing. Upon reflection, though, I think it’s a mistake to focus too narrowly on the interests of consumers. For example (from my Taleb review a couple years ago): The discussion on page 112 of how Ralph Nader saved lives (mostly via seat belts in cars) reminds me of his car-bumper campaign in the 1970s. My dad subscribed to Consumer Reports then (he still does, actually, and I think reads it for pleasure–it must be one of those Depression-mentality things), and at one point they were pushing heavily for the 5-mph bumpers. Apparently there was some federal regulation about how strong
4 0.80478752 1882 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-03-The statistical properties of smart chains (and referral chains more generally)
Introduction: Louis Mittel writes: The premise of the column this guy is starting is interesting: Noah Davis interviews a smart person and then interviews the smartest person that smart person knows and so on. It reminded me of you mentioning survey design strategy of asking people about other people, like “How many people do you know named Stuart?” or “How many people do you know that have had an abortion?” Ignoring the interview aspect of what this guy is doing, I think there’s some cool questions about the distribution/path behavior of smartest-person-I-know chains (say, seeded at random). Do they loop? If so, how long do they run before looping, how large are the loops? What parts of the population do the explore? Do you know of anything that’s been done on something like this? My reply: Interesting question. It could be asked of any referral chain, for example asking a sequence of people, “Who’s the tallest person you know?” or “Who’s the best piano player you know” or “Who’
5 0.80079979 2123 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-04-Tesla fires!
Introduction: Paul Kedrosky writes: Curious if you’ve looked at the current debate about Tesla fires, statistically speaking. Lots of arm-waving about true/sample proportions, sample sizes, normal approximations, etc. Would love to see a blog post if it intrigues you at all. I hadn’t heard about this at all! I mean, sure, I’d heard of Tesla, this is an electric car being built by some eccentric billionaire . But I didn’t know they were catching on fire! At this point I was curious so I followed the link. It was an interesting discussion to read, partly because some of the commenters were so open about their financial interests; for example , i felt like now is a good time to share some of my insights, specifically regarding the tesla fires. i know many people won’t like to hear what i have to say. and i don’t have a longer term holding in tesla any more, although sometimes i day-trade tesla from the long or short side. tesla has been kind to me, both as an investor and model s
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same-blog 1 0.92530584 1935 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-12-“A tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses”
Introduction: Tyler Cowen posts the following note from a taxi driver: I learned very early on to never drive someone to their destination if it was a route they drove themselves, say to their home from the airport . . . Everyone prides themselves on driving the shortest route but they rarely do. . . . When I first started driving a cab, I drove the shortest route—always, I’m ethical—but people would accuse me of taking the long way because it wasn’t the way they drove . . . In the end, experts they consider themselves to be, people are a tangle of unexamined emotional impulses and illogical responses. I take a lot of rides to and from the airport, and I can assure you that a lot of taxi drivers don’t know the good routes. Once I had to start screaming from the back seat to stop the guy from getting on the BQE. I don’t “pride myself” on knowing a good route home from the airport, but I prefer the good route. I’m guessing that the taxi driver quoted above is subject to the same illusions
2 0.87947452 919 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-21-Least surprising headline of the year
Introduction: “ Poker Web Site Cheated Users, U.S. Suit Says “ Shocking. Who’d have thought the developers of an online poker site would cheat??
3 0.82204944 737 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-30-Memorial Day question
Introduction: When I was a kid they shifted a bunch of holidays to Monday. (Not all the holidays: they kept New Year’s, Christmas, and July 4th on fixed dates, they kept Thanksgiving on a Thursday, and for some reason the shifted Veterans Day didn’t stick. But they successfully moved Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Columbus Day. It makes sense to give people a 3-day weekend. I have no idea why they picked Monday rather than Friday, but either one would do, I suppose. My question is: if this Monday holiday thing was such a good idea, why did it take them so long to do it?
4 0.71477115 1179 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-21-“Readability” as freedom from the actual sensation of reading
Introduction: In her essay on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, Claudia Roth Pierpoint writes: The much remarked “readability” of the book must have played a part in this smooth passage from the page to the screen, since “readability” has to do not only with freedom from obscurity but, paradoxically, with freedom from the actual sensation of reading [emphasis added]—of the tug and traction of words as they move thoughts into place in the mind. Requiring, in fact, the least reading, the most “readable” book allows its characters to slip easily through nets of words and into other forms. Popular art has been well defined by just this effortless movement from medium to medium, which is carried out, as Leslie Fiedler observed in relation to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “without loss of intensity or alteration of meaning.” Isabel Archer rises from the page only in the hanging garments of Henry James’s prose, but Scarlett O’Hara is a free woman. Well put. I wish Pierpoint would come out with ano
5 0.7129817 741 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-02-At least he didn’t prove a false theorem
Introduction: Siobhan Mattison pointed me to this . I’m just disappointed they didn’t use my Fenimore Cooper line. Although I guess that reference wouldn’t resonate much outside the U.S. P.S. My guess was correct See comments below. Actually, the reference probably wouldn’t resonate so well among under-50-year-olds in the U.S. either. Sort of like the Jaycees story.
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