andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-1997 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Following up on our recent discussion of combative linguist Noam Chomsky and disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, here are some stories from Jay Livingston about monkey research. Don’t get me wrong—I eat burgers, so I’m not trying to get on my moral high horse here. But the stories do get you thinking about measurement error and why I would not trust the PI of a monkey study to code his own measurements and keep his data secret.
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1 Following up on our recent discussion of combative linguist Noam Chomsky and disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, here are some stories from Jay Livingston about monkey research. [sent-1, score-1.457]
2 Don’t get me wrong—I eat burgers, so I’m not trying to get on my moral high horse here. [sent-2, score-0.908]
3 But the stories do get you thinking about measurement error and why I would not trust the PI of a monkey study to code his own measurements and keep his data secret. [sent-3, score-1.682]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 1997 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-24-Measurement error in monkey studies
Introduction: Following up on our recent discussion of combative linguist Noam Chomsky and disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, here are some stories from Jay Livingston about monkey research. Don’t get me wrong—I eat burgers, so I’m not trying to get on my moral high horse here. But the stories do get you thinking about measurement error and why I would not trust the PI of a monkey study to code his own measurements and keep his data secret.
2 0.33997571 1901 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-16-Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad
Introduction: The other day, a friend told me that when he saw me blogging on Noam Chomsky, he was surprised not to see any mention of disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser. I was like, whaaaaaa? I had no idea these two had any connection. In fact, though, they wrote papers together. This made me wonder what Chomsky thought of Hauser’s data scandal. I googled *marc hauser noam chomsky* and the first item that came up was this, from July 2011, reported by Tom Bartlett: I [Bartlett] asked Chomsky for his comment on the Hauser resignation and he e-mailed the following: Mark Hauser is a fine scientist with an outstanding record of accomplishment. His resignation is a serious loss for Harvard, and given the nature of the attack on him, for science generally. Chomsky is a mentor of Hauser so I can’t fault Chomsky for defending the guy. But why couldn’t he have stuck with something more general, something like, “I respect and admire Mark Hauser and am not aware of any improprieties in his w
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Introduction: A journalist asked me for my thoughts on academics and blogging, in light of the recently announced move of the sister blog to the Washington Post. I responded as follows: John Sides is the leader of the Monkey Cage and in particular was the key person involved in the Washington Post move. But I will give you some general comments based on my own experiences. I started blogging in 2004: Samantha Cook (my postdoc at the time) and I set up the blog so that we could communicate our partially-formed research ideas to each other, in a way that would be open to the world so that (a) we could get input from interested outsiders, and (b) we could publicize our work. We decided to post daily (or approximately thus). At the time, I figured that if there was ever a time that we ran out of material, I could post summaries of my old research papers. The blog quickly became a place for us to give our various thoughts on statistical modeling, causal inference, and social science.
4 0.20394582 1812 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-19-Chomsky chomsky chomsky chomsky furiously
Introduction: Noam Chomsky elicits a lot of emotional reactions. I’ve talked with some linguists who think Chomsky’s been a real roadblock to research in recent decades. Other linguists love Chomsky, but I think they’re the kind of linguists I wouldn’t spend much time talking with. Many people admire Chomsky’s political activism, but sociologist blogger Fabio Rojas distinguishes “the Chomsky’s of the world who sit around and speechify about the man” from the good guys, “the academics whose work leads to tangible improvements.” When Thomas Basbøll sent me this note, I [Basbøll] wonder if you react in the same (sympathetic) way to these remarks by Chomsky [text here ] as I do. I think he’s right that something happens to research when “applications” come into view. I like his distinction between two conceptions of science, one of which is based on “big data” in which patterns are found by brute information processing, and the other which requires the construction of simple, elegant models
Introduction: Elsewhere: 1. They asked me to write about my “favorite election- or campaign-related movie, novel, or TV show” (Salon) 2. The shopping period is over; the time for buying has begun (NYT) 3. If anybody’s gonna be criticizing my tax plan, I want it to be this guy (Monkey Cage) 4. The 4 key qualifications to be a great president; unfortunately George W. Bush satisfies all four, and Ronald Reagan doesn’t match any of them (Monkey Cage) 5. The politics of eyeliner (Monkey Cage)
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simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.91843855 1997 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-24-Measurement error in monkey studies
Introduction: Following up on our recent discussion of combative linguist Noam Chomsky and disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, here are some stories from Jay Livingston about monkey research. Don’t get me wrong—I eat burgers, so I’m not trying to get on my moral high horse here. But the stories do get you thinking about measurement error and why I would not trust the PI of a monkey study to code his own measurements and keep his data secret.
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Introduction: The other day, a friend told me that when he saw me blogging on Noam Chomsky, he was surprised not to see any mention of disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser. I was like, whaaaaaa? I had no idea these two had any connection. In fact, though, they wrote papers together. This made me wonder what Chomsky thought of Hauser’s data scandal. I googled *marc hauser noam chomsky* and the first item that came up was this, from July 2011, reported by Tom Bartlett: I [Bartlett] asked Chomsky for his comment on the Hauser resignation and he e-mailed the following: Mark Hauser is a fine scientist with an outstanding record of accomplishment. His resignation is a serious loss for Harvard, and given the nature of the attack on him, for science generally. Chomsky is a mentor of Hauser so I can’t fault Chomsky for defending the guy. But why couldn’t he have stuck with something more general, something like, “I respect and admire Mark Hauser and am not aware of any improprieties in his w
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Introduction: God is in every leaf of every tree , but he is not in every leaf of every parable. Let me explain with a story. A few months ago I read the new book, Doing Data Science, by Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neal, and I came across the following motivation for comprehensive integration of data sources, a story that is reminiscent of the parables we sometimes see in business books: By some estimates, one or two patients died per week in a certain smallish town because of the lack of information flow between the hospital’s emergency room and the nearby mental health clinic. In other words, if the records had been easier to match, they’d have been able to save more lives. On the other hand, if it had been easy to match records, other breaches of confidence might also have occurred. Of course it’s hard to know exactly how many lives are at stake, but it’s nontrivial. The moral: We can assume we think privacy is a generally good thing. . . . But privacy takes lives too, as we see from
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Introduction: Business statistician Kaiser Fung just came out with another book, this one full of stories about how organizations use data: 1. Why do law school deans send each other junk mail? 2. Can a new statistic make us less fat? 3. How can sellouts ruin a business? 4. Will personalizing deals save Groupon? 5. Why do marketers send you mixed messages? 6. Are they new jobs if no one can apply? 7. How much did you pay for the eggs? 8. Are you a better coach or manager? Unlike most books of this sort, there’s no hero: These are not stories about a fabulous businessman who made millions of dollars by following his dream and taking the customer seriously, nor are they Gladwellian sagas of brilliant scientists, nor are they auto-Gladwellian tales of the Ariely variety. In some ways, the stories in Fung’s book have the form of opened-up business reporting, in which you get to see the statistical models underlying various assumptions and conclusions. In that sense, this b
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Introduction: As a statistician I am particularly worried about the rhetorical power of anecdotes (even though I use them in my own reasoning; see discussion below). But much can be learned from a true anecdote. The rough edges—the places where the anecdote doesn’t fit your thesis—these are where you learn. We have recently had a discussion ( here and here ) of Karl Weick, a prominent scholar of business management who plagiarized a story and then went on to draw different lessons from the pilfered anecdote in several different publications published over many years. Setting aside an issues of plagiarism and rulebreaking, I argue that, by hiding the source of the story and changing its form, Weick and his management-science audience are losing their ability to get anything out of it beyond empty confirmation. A full discussion follows. 1. The lost Hungarian soldiers Thomas Basbøll (who has the unusual (to me) job of “writing consultant” at the Copenhagen Business School) has been
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same-blog 1 0.86492491 1997 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-24-Measurement error in monkey studies
Introduction: Following up on our recent discussion of combative linguist Noam Chomsky and disgraced primatologist Marc Hauser, here are some stories from Jay Livingston about monkey research. Don’t get me wrong—I eat burgers, so I’m not trying to get on my moral high horse here. But the stories do get you thinking about measurement error and why I would not trust the PI of a monkey study to code his own measurements and keep his data secret.
Introduction: Alexander at GiveWell writes : The Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries (DCP2), a major report funded by the Gates Foundation . . . provides an estimate of $3.41 per disability-adjusted life-year (DALY) for the cost-effectiveness of soil-transmitted-helminth (STH) treatment, implying that STH treatment is one of the most cost-effective interventions for global health. In investigating this figure, we have corresponded, over a period of months, with six scholars who had been directly or indirectly involved in the production of the estimate. Eventually, we were able to obtain the spreadsheet that was used to generate the $3.41/DALY estimate. That spreadsheet contains five separate errors that, when corrected, shift the estimated cost effectiveness of deworming from $3.41 to $326.43. [I think they mean to say $300 -- ed.] We came to this conclusion a year after learning that the DCP2’s published cost-effectiveness estimate for schistosomiasis treatment – another kind of
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Introduction: I was trying to make some new graphs using 5-year-old R code and I got all these problems because I was reading in files with variable names such as “co.fipsid” and now R is automatically changing them to “co_fipsid”. Or maybe the names had underbars all along, and the old R had changed them into dots. Whatever. I understand that backward compatibility can be hard to maintain, but this is just annoying.
4 0.74177063 1618 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-11-The consulting biz
Introduction: I received the following (unsolicited) email: Hello, *** LLC, a ***-based market research company, has a financial client who is interested in speaking with a statistician who has done research in the field of Alzheimer’s Disease and preferably familiar with the SOLA and BAPI trials. We offer an honorarium of $200 for a 30 minute telephone interview. Please advise us if you have an employment or consulting agreement with any organization or operate professionally pursuant to an organization’s code of conduct or employee manual that may control activities by you outside of your regular present and former employment, such as participating in this consulting project for MedPanel. If there are such contracts or other documents that do apply to you, please forward MedPanel a copy of each such document asap as we are obligated to review such documents to determine if you are permitted to participate as a consultant for MedPanel on a project with this particular client. If you are
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Introduction: Troels Ring writes: I have measured total phosphorus, TP, on a number of dialysis patients, and also measured conventional phosphate, Pi. Now P is exchanged with the environment as Pi, so in principle a correlation between TP and Pi could perhaps be expected. I’m really most interested in the fraction of TP which is not Pi, that is TP-Pi. I would also expect that to be positively correlated with Pi. However, looking at the data using a mixed model an insignificant negative correlation is obtained. Then I thought, that since TP-Pi is bound to be small if Pi is large a negative correlation is almost dictated by the math even if the biology would have it otherwise in so far as the the TP-Pi, likely organic P, must someday have been Pi. Hence I thought about correcting the slight negative correlation between TP-Pi and Pi for the expected large negative correlation due to the math – to eventually recover what I came from: a positive correlation. People seems to agree that this thinki
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