andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1949 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Nicholas Christakis, a medical scientist perhaps best known for his controversial claim (see also here ), based on joint work with James Fowler, that obesity is contagious, writes : The social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. . . . I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomen
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Nicholas Christakis, a medical scientist perhaps best known for his controversial claim (see also here ), based on joint work with James Fowler, that obesity is contagious, writes : The social sciences have stagnated. [sent-1, score-0.441]
2 They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. [sent-2, score-0.152]
3 This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. [sent-3, score-0.486]
4 I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. [sent-7, score-1.051]
5 But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. [sent-8, score-1.631]
6 There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. [sent-9, score-0.167]
7 And repeatedly observing these phenomena does not help us fix them. [sent-10, score-0.083]
8 I’m no economist so I can let others discuss the bit about “monopoly power is bad for markets. [sent-12, score-0.209]
9 ” I assume that the study by economists of monopoly power is a bit more sophisticated than that! [sent-13, score-0.748]
10 I have studied racial profiling, and I can assure you that this work is not about the claim “that people are racially biased. [sent-14, score-0.627]
11 ” I can also assure you that, whatever it is we have learned, it’s not true that “everyone knows” it. [sent-15, score-0.151]
12 As Duncan Watts has written so memorably , it’s easy to say that everything is obvious (once you know the answer). [sent-16, score-0.095]
13 Regarding the question of illness being distributed by social class: Is it really true that “everybody knows,” for example, that Finland has higher suicide rates than Sweden , or that foreign-born Latinos have lower rates of psychiatric disorders . [sent-17, score-0.986]
14 These findings are based on public data so everybody should know them, but in any case the goal of social science is not (just) to educate people on what should be known to them, but also to understand why. [sent-18, score-0.419]
15 The study of the contagion of obesity is just fine. [sent-21, score-0.306]
16 But to say that this is the real stuff, and then to dismiss studies of monopoly power, racial attitudes, and variation in disease rates–that’s just silly. [sent-23, score-0.659]
17 So I applaud Christakis for sticking out his neck to participate in this debate. [sent-25, score-0.258]
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Introduction: Nicholas Christakis, a medical scientist perhaps best known for his controversial claim (see also here ), based on joint work with James Fowler, that obesity is contagious, writes : The social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. . . . I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomen
Introduction: The other day, Nicholas Christakis wrote an article in the newspaper criticizing academic social science departments: The social sciences have stagnated. . . . This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. . . . I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomena does not help us fix them. I disagreed , saying that Christakis wasn’t giving social science research enough credit: I’m no economist so I can let others discuss the bit about “monopoly power is bad for markets.” I assume that the study by
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Introduction: After I posted on Russ Lyons’s criticisms of the work of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler’s work on social networks, several people emailed in with links to related articles. (Nobody wants to comment on the blog anymore; all I get is emails.) Here they are: Political scientists Hans Noel and Brendan Nyhan wrote a paper called “The ‘Unfriending’ Problem: The Consequences of Homophily in Friendship Retention for Causal Estimates of Social Influence” in which they argue that the Christakis-Fowler results are subject to bias because of patterns in the time course of friendships. Statisticians Cosma Shalizi and AT wrote a paper called “Homophily and Contagion Are Generically Confounded in Observational Social Network Studies” arguing that analyses such as those of Christakis and Fowler cannot hope to disentangle different sorts of network effects. And Christakis and Fowler reply to Noel and Nyhan, Shalizi and Thomas, Lyons, and others in an article that begins: H
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Introduction: Russ Lyons points us to a discussion in Statistics in Medicine of the famous claims by Christakis and Fowler on the contagion of obesity etc. James O’Malley and Christakis and Fowler present the positive case. Andrew Thomas and Tyler VanderWeele present constructive criticism. Christakis and Fowler reply . Coincidentally, a couple weeks ago an epidemiologist was explaining to me the differences between the Framingham Heart Study and the Nurses Health Study and why Framingham got the postmenopausal supplement risks right while Nurses got it wrong. P.S. The journal issue also includes a comment on “A distribution-free test of constant mean in linear mixed effects models.” Wow! I had no idea people still did this sort of thing. How horrible. But I guess that’s what half-life is all about. These ideas last forever, they just become less and less relevant to people.
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Introduction: Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler are famous for finding that obesity is contagious. Their claims, which have been received with both respect and skepticism (perhaps we need a new word for this: “respecticism”?) are based on analysis of data from the Framingham heart study, a large longitudinal public-health study that happened to have some social network data (for the odd reason that each participant was asked to provide the name of a friend who could help the researchers locate them if they were to move away during the study period. The short story is that if your close contact became obese, you were likely to become obese also. The long story is a debate about the reliability of this finding (that is, can it be explained by measurement error and sampling variability) and its causal implications. This sort of study is in my wheelhouse, as it were, but I have never looked at the Christakis-Fowler work in detail. Thus, my previous and current comments are more along the line
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Introduction: I’m sorry I don’t have any new zombie papers in time for Halloween. Instead I’d like to be a little monster by reproducing a mini-rant from this article on experimental reasoning in social science: I will restrict my discussion to social science examples. Social scientists are often tempted to illustrate their ideas with examples from medical research. When it comes to medicine, though, we are, with rare exceptions, at best ignorant laypersons (in my case, not even reaching that level), and it is my impression that by reaching for medical analogies we are implicitly trying to borrow some of the scientific and cultural authority of that field for our own purposes. Evidence-based medicine is the subject of a large literature of its own (see, for example, Lau, Ioannidis, and Schmid, 1998).
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Introduction: Philosophy professor Gary Gutting writes : Public policy debates often involve appeals to results of work in social sciences like economics and sociology. . . . How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions? . . . The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive. . . . But how reliable is even the best work on the effects of teaching? How, for example, does it compare with the best work by biochemists on the effects of light on plant growth? Since humans are much more complex than plants and biochemists have far more refined techniques for studying plants, we may well expect the biochemical work to be far more reliable. . . . While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not. OK, fine. But then comes the punchline: Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social scienc
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Introduction: Nicholas Christakis, a medical scientist perhaps best known for his controversial claim (see also here ), based on joint work with James Fowler, that obesity is contagious, writes : The social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. . . . I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomen
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