andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1945 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: At first glance, that’s what I thought Tyler Cowen was asking . I assumed he was asking about the characters, not the audience, as watching a play seems like a pretty safe activity (A. Lincoln excepted). Characters in plays die all the time. I wonder what the chance is? Something between 5% and 10%, I’d guess. I’d guess your chance of dying (as a character) in a movie would be higher. On the other hand, movies have lots of extras who just show up and leave; if you count them maybe the risk isn’t so high. Perhaps the right way to do this is to weight people by screen time? P.S. The Mezzanine aside, works of art and literature tend to focus on the dramatic moments of lives, so it makes sense that death will be overrepresented.
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1 At first glance, that’s what I thought Tyler Cowen was asking . [sent-1, score-0.291]
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3 I’d guess your chance of dying (as a character) in a movie would be higher. [sent-7, score-0.591]
4 On the other hand, movies have lots of extras who just show up and leave; if you count them maybe the risk isn’t so high. [sent-8, score-0.632]
5 Perhaps the right way to do this is to weight people by screen time? [sent-9, score-0.35]
6 The Mezzanine aside, works of art and literature tend to focus on the dramatic moments of lives, so it makes sense that death will be overrepresented. [sent-12, score-1.111]
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same-blog 1 0.99999994 1945 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-18-“How big is your chance of dying in an ordinary play?”
Introduction: At first glance, that’s what I thought Tyler Cowen was asking . I assumed he was asking about the characters, not the audience, as watching a play seems like a pretty safe activity (A. Lincoln excepted). Characters in plays die all the time. I wonder what the chance is? Something between 5% and 10%, I’d guess. I’d guess your chance of dying (as a character) in a movie would be higher. On the other hand, movies have lots of extras who just show up and leave; if you count them maybe the risk isn’t so high. Perhaps the right way to do this is to weight people by screen time? P.S. The Mezzanine aside, works of art and literature tend to focus on the dramatic moments of lives, so it makes sense that death will be overrepresented.
2 0.17184523 1381 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-16-The Art of Fielding
Introduction: I liked it; the reviews were well-deserved. It indeed is a cross between The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop. What struck me most, though, was the contrast with Indecision, the novel by Harbach’s associate, Benjamin Kunkel. As I noted a few years ago , Indecision was notable in that all the characters had agency. That is, each character had his or her own ideas and seemed to act on his or her own ideas, rather than merely carrying the plot along or providing scenery. In contrast, the most gripping drama in The Art of Fielding seem to be characters’ struggling with their plot-determined roles (hence the connection with Coover’s God-soaked baseball classic). Also notable to me was that the college-aged characters not being particularly obsessed with sex—I guess this is that easy-going hook-up culture I keep reading about—while at the same time, just about all the characters seem to be involved in serious drug addiction. I’ve re
3 0.1188117 1895 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-12-Peter Thiel is writing another book!
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links : “I’m writing this book because we need to think about the future for more than just 140 characters or 15 minutes at a time if we want to make real long-term progress,” Mr. Thiel said in a statement. “’Zero to One’ is about learning from Silicon Valley how to solve hard problems and build great things that have never existed before.” I wonder how Thiel’s previous book turned out?
4 0.11866912 1785 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-02-So much artistic talent
Introduction: I saw this excellent art show the other day, and it reminded me how much artistic talent is out there. I really have no idea whassup with those all-black canvases and the other stuff you see at modern art museums, given that there’s so much interesting new stuff being created every year. I see a big difference between art made by people who feel they have something they want to say, compared to art being made by people who feel they are supposed to make art because they’re artists. And there’s also the internal logic of art responding to other art, as Tom Wolfe discussed in The Painted Word.
5 0.11138538 174 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-01-Literature and life
Introduction: What can we learn about an author from his or her fiction? This is an old, old question, I know. But I still can’t help thinking about it when I read a book. John Updike ‘s stories are full of male characters whom women find irresistibly attractive. I can only assume that this reflects Updike’s own experiences, to some extent. If he had not been, in reality, catnip to women, I imagine he’d have made more of a big deal about the episodes in his books where women kept falling into his protagonists’ laps. Same for John D. Macdonald , although there I suppose it’s possible he was just throwing in the sex to sell books. And even more so for Richard Ford . This guy’s male characters are so smooth, there’s no way that Ford isn’t/wasn’t like that too. What about Lorrie Moore? I think she must have had a very frustrating life (so far). I say this because her stories always seem to be centered around a female character who is witty, thoughtful, and refined, and surrounded by re
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same-blog 1 0.95603794 1945 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-18-“How big is your chance of dying in an ordinary play?”
Introduction: At first glance, that’s what I thought Tyler Cowen was asking . I assumed he was asking about the characters, not the audience, as watching a play seems like a pretty safe activity (A. Lincoln excepted). Characters in plays die all the time. I wonder what the chance is? Something between 5% and 10%, I’d guess. I’d guess your chance of dying (as a character) in a movie would be higher. On the other hand, movies have lots of extras who just show up and leave; if you count them maybe the risk isn’t so high. Perhaps the right way to do this is to weight people by screen time? P.S. The Mezzanine aside, works of art and literature tend to focus on the dramatic moments of lives, so it makes sense that death will be overrepresented.
2 0.80379862 1553 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-30-Real rothko, fake rothko
Introduction: Jay Livingston writes : I know that in art, quality and value are two very different things. Still, I had to stop and wonder when I read about Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, who in 2004 paid $8.3 million for a painting attributed to Mark Rothko that they now say is a worthless fake. One day a painting is worth $8.3 million; the next day, the same painting – same quality, same capacity to give aesthetic pleasure or do whatever it is that art does – is “worthless.”* Art forgery also makes me wonder about the buyer’s motive. If the buyer wanted only to have and to gaze upon something beautiful, something with artistic merit, then a fake Rothko is no different than a real Rothko. It seems more likely that what the buyer wants is to own something valuable – i.e., something that costs a lot. Displaying your brokerage account statements is just too crude and obvious. What the high-end art market offers is a kind of money laundering. Objects that are rare and therefore expensive
3 0.7700569 1905 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-18-There are no fat sprinters
Introduction: This post is by Phil. A little over three years ago I wrote a post about exercise and weight loss in which I described losing a fair amount of weight due to (I believe) an exercise regime, with no effort to change my diet; this contradicted the prediction of studies that had recently been released. The comment thread on that post is quite interesting: a lot of people had had similar experiences — losing weight, or keeping it off, with an exercise program that includes very short periods of exercise at maximal intensity — while other people expressed some skepticism about my claims. Some commenters said that I risked injury; others said it was too early to judge anything because my weight loss might not last. The people who predicted injury were right: running the curve during a 200m sprint a month or two after that post, I strained my Achilles tendon. Nothing really serious, but it did keep me off the track for a couple of months, and rather than go back to sprinting I switched t
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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
5 0.73416036 2341 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-20-plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Introduction: This post is by Phil, and I’m writing about the slow pace of change in 21st-century America. [Note added later: at the time that I wrote this, I was unaware that a year-and-a-half ago Andrew had written a similar post on the theme. I suspect I, and perhaps most of this blog's readers, missed it because he posted it on New Year's Day]. [Note added later still: evidently I'm wrong and I did see Andrew's post, because I left a comment on it: " If you want to pick a 50-year period, with nice round numbers for the start and the end, my vote for the biggest lifestyle change for Americans is 1900-1950. Radio, telephone, television, indoor plumbing, refrigerators, home air conditioning, automobiles, airplanes… in the past 50 years all of those things have gotten better than they used to be (although I’m not sure there have been any major advances in indoor plumbing), but the change is small compared with having vs not having." And I was wrong about indoor plumbing, which most people di
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1 0.92362809 149 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Demographics: what variable best predicts a financial crisis?
Introduction: A few weeks ago I wrote about the importance of demographics in political trends . Today I’d like to show you how demographics help predict financial crises. Here are a few examples of countries with major crises. The working-age population in Japan peaked in the 1995 census . The 1995 Financial Crisis in Japan The working-age USA population growth slows down to unprecedented levels in 2008 (see figure below) Financial crisis of 2007-2010 . (Also, notice previous dips in 2001, 1991 and 1981, and consider the list of recessions .) China’s working-age population, age 15 to 64, has grown continuously. The labor pool will peak in 2015 and then decline. There are more charts in Demography and Growth report by the Reserve Bank of Australia: Wikipedia surveys the causes of the financial crisis, such as “liquidity shortfall in the United States banking system caused by the overvaluation of assets”. Oh my! Slightly better than the usu
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Introduction: At first glance, that’s what I thought Tyler Cowen was asking . I assumed he was asking about the characters, not the audience, as watching a play seems like a pretty safe activity (A. Lincoln excepted). Characters in plays die all the time. I wonder what the chance is? Something between 5% and 10%, I’d guess. I’d guess your chance of dying (as a character) in a movie would be higher. On the other hand, movies have lots of extras who just show up and leave; if you count them maybe the risk isn’t so high. Perhaps the right way to do this is to weight people by screen time? P.S. The Mezzanine aside, works of art and literature tend to focus on the dramatic moments of lives, so it makes sense that death will be overrepresented.
3 0.87106967 1505 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-20-“Joseph Anton”
Introduction: I only read the review , not the book. What puzzled me was not any lack of self-awareness but rather this bit: The title of Mr. Rushdie’s new memoir . . . comes from the alias he assumed when British police told him back in 1989 that he needed a pseudonym: the Joseph comes from Joseph Conrad, the Anton from Anton Chekhov. The protection officers issued to him by the British government soon took to calling him “Joe,” an abbreviation he says he detested. The thing that I don’t understand is why he detested the nickname. If I were in a comparable situation, I think I’d appreciate if my security detail gave me a friendly nickname. Then again, with the stress that Rushdie’s been under, I can imagine all sorts of personality transformations.
4 0.85799521 243 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-30-Computer models of the oil spill
Introduction: Chris Wilson points me to this visualizatio n of three physical models of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Cool (and scary) stuff. Wilson writes: One of the major advantages is that the models are 3D and show the plumes and tails beneath the surface. One of the major disadvantages is that they’re still just models.
Introduction: A reporter emailed me the other day with a question about a case I’d never heard of before, a company called Herbalife that is being accused of being a pyramid scheme. The reporter pointed me to this document which describes a survey conducted by “a third party firm called Lieberman Research”: Two independent studies took place using real time (aka “river”) sampling, in which respondents were intercepted across a wide array of websites Sample size of 2,000 adults 18+ matched to U.S. census on age, gender, income, region and ethnicity “River sampling” in this case appears to mean, according to the reporter, that “people were invited into it through online ads.” The survey found that 5% of U.S. households had purchased Herbalife products during the past three months (with a “0.8% margin of error,” ha ha ha). They they did a multiplication and a division to estimate that only 8% of households who bought these products were Herbalife distributors: 480,000 active distributor
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