andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1952 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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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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1 The other day, Nicholas Christakis wrote an article in the newspaper criticizing academic social science departments: The social sciences have stagnated. [sent-1, score-0.629]
2 I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. [sent-9, score-1.188]
3 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-10, score-1.028]
4 There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. [sent-11, score-0.237]
5 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. [sent-13, score-0.644]
6 ” I assume that the study by economists of monopoly power is a bit more sophisticated than that! [sent-14, score-0.454]
7 I have studied racial profiling, and I can assure you that this work is not about the claim “that people are racially biased. [sent-15, score-0.349]
8 ” 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-16, score-0.496]
9 pdf And here are a few papers (from Nature and PNAS) that further explore social networks using diverse methods, both observational and experimental. [sent-24, score-0.396]
10 This does not mean what we social scientists are doing is bad; but it would be arrogance to assume we have nothing to learn. [sent-40, score-0.376]
11 What I didn’t agree with in the op-ed was the emphasis on diminishing returns from the continuing study of topics such as monopoly power, racial profiling, and health inequality. [sent-45, score-0.907]
12 I just don’t think this sort of work should be privileged over work on topics like monopoly power, racial profiling, and health inequality. [sent-50, score-0.828]
13 He could easily stayed above the fray and not responded at all, based on the quite reasonable theory that many more people would read his NYT op-ed than would ever see this blog. [sent-54, score-0.208]
14 The combination of speculation and science is fascinating and leaves me eager to learn about the next wave of research in this area. [sent-63, score-0.205]
15 To move beyond a pointless who-misunderstood-whom back-and-forth, let me now shift the discussion to an interesting issue raised by Christakis: What are the (relatively) settled matters in the social sciences? [sent-68, score-0.432]
16 Can we social scientists can ever say that “we have pretty much figured this out” (as in the way biologists have figured out certain topics)? [sent-69, score-0.592]
17 Krugman would say it’s settled that it’s a good idea to expand government hiring during a depression, but others disagree! [sent-71, score-0.267]
18 In various ares of social research, there’s debate about the replicability of all sorts of claimed effects. [sent-73, score-0.351]
19 Overall, I’d say that, if anything, social scientists perhaps don’t spend enough time re-confirming the definitive statements. [sent-77, score-0.384]
20 There’s a real push toward novelty, to the extent that maybe we don’t have enough “gold standards” of well-established social patterns. [sent-78, score-0.231]
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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: 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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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: 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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