andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2021 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Psychology researcher Chris Chabris writes : Rolf Dobelli, a Swiss writer, published a book called The Art of Thinking Clearly earlier this year with HarperCollins in the U.S. The book’s original German edition was a #1 bestseller, and the book has sold over one million copies worldwide. In perusing Mr. Dobelli’s book, we noticed several familiar-sounding passages. On closer examination, we found five instances of unattributed material that is either reproduced verbatim or closely paraphrased from text and arguments in our book, The Invisible Gorilla (Crown, 2010). They are listed at the end of this note. Apparently he ripped off Nassim Taleb too . A million copies, huh? I guess crime really does pay! Maybe he could get an appointment at Harvard Law School or, if that falls through, a position as writer-in-residence at the statistics department of George Mason University [no link needed for that one -- ed.]. P.S. Chabris notes that there’s an odd coincidence regardin
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1 Psychology researcher Chris Chabris writes : Rolf Dobelli, a Swiss writer, published a book called The Art of Thinking Clearly earlier this year with HarperCollins in the U. [sent-1, score-0.244]
2 The book’s original German edition was a #1 bestseller, and the book has sold over one million copies worldwide. [sent-3, score-0.808]
3 On closer examination, we found five instances of unattributed material that is either reproduced verbatim or closely paraphrased from text and arguments in our book, The Invisible Gorilla (Crown, 2010). [sent-6, score-0.688]
4 Maybe he could get an appointment at Harvard Law School or, if that falls through, a position as writer-in-residence at the statistics department of George Mason University [no link needed for that one -- ed. [sent-11, score-0.302]
5 Chabris notes that there’s an odd coincidence regarding the analogy to Jonah Lehrer, since he reviewed Lehrer’s last book for the Times. [sent-15, score-0.718]
6 The assignment I want from the Times is to review “Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. [sent-16, score-0.223]
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same-blog 1 0.99999988 2021 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-13-Swiss Jonah Lehrer
Introduction: Psychology researcher Chris Chabris writes : Rolf Dobelli, a Swiss writer, published a book called The Art of Thinking Clearly earlier this year with HarperCollins in the U.S. The book’s original German edition was a #1 bestseller, and the book has sold over one million copies worldwide. In perusing Mr. Dobelli’s book, we noticed several familiar-sounding passages. On closer examination, we found five instances of unattributed material that is either reproduced verbatim or closely paraphrased from text and arguments in our book, The Invisible Gorilla (Crown, 2010). They are listed at the end of this note. Apparently he ripped off Nassim Taleb too . A million copies, huh? I guess crime really does pay! Maybe he could get an appointment at Harvard Law School or, if that falls through, a position as writer-in-residence at the statistics department of George Mason University [no link needed for that one -- ed.]. P.S. Chabris notes that there’s an odd coincidence regardin
2 0.25324184 2057 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-10-Chris Chabris is irritated by Malcolm Gladwell
Introduction: Christopher Chabris reviewed the new book by Malcolm Gladwell: One thing “David and Goliath” shows is that Mr. Gladwell has not changed his own strategy, despite serious criticism of his prior work. What he presents are mostly just intriguing possibilities and musings about human behavior, but what his publisher sells them as, and what his readers may incorrectly take them for, are lawful, causal rules that explain how the world really works. Mr. Gladwell should acknowledge when he is speculating or working with thin evidentiary soup. Yet far from abandoning his hand or even standing pat, Mr. Gladwell has doubled down. This will surely bring more success to a Goliath of nonfiction writing, but not to his readers. Afterward he blogged some further thoughts about the popular popular science writer. Good stuff . Chabris has a thoughtful explanation of why the “Gladwell is just an entertainer” alibi doesn’t work for him (Chabris). Some of his discussion reminds me of my articl
3 0.2433344 2024 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-15-Swiss Jonah Lehrer update
Introduction: Nassim Taleb adds this link to the Dobelli story . I’m confused. I thought Swiss dudes were supposed to plagiarize their own stuff, not rip off other people’s. Whassup with that?
Introduction: Dan Kahan writes on what seems to be the topic of the week : In reflecting on Lehrer , I [Kahan] have to wonder why the sanction is so much more severe — basically career “death penalty” subject to parole [I think he means "life imprisonment" --- ed.], I suppose, if he manages decades of “good behavior” — for this science journalist when scholars who stick plagiarized material in their “popular science” writing don’t even get slap on wrist — more like shrug of the shoulders. I do think the behavior is comparable; if anything, it’s probably “less wrong” to make up innocuous filler quotes (the Dylan one is, for sure), then to stick paragraphs of someone else’s writing into a book. But the cause is the same: laziness. (The plagarism I’m talking about is not the sort done by Wegman; its sort done by scholars who use factory production techniques to write popular press books — teams of research assistants who write memos, which the “author” then knits together & passes off as learne
5 0.12883013 2058 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-11-Gladwell and Chabris, David and Goliath, and science writing as stone soup
Introduction: The only thing is, I’m not sure who’s David here and who is Goliath. From the standpoint of book sales, Gladwell is Goliath for sure. On the other hand, Gladwell’s credibility has been weakened over the years by fights with bigshots such as Steven Pinker. Maybe the best analogy is a boxing match where Gladwell stands in the ring and fighter after fighter is sent in to bang him up. At some point the heavyweight gets a little bit tired. (Recently Gladwell had a New Yorker column defending dopers such as Lance Armstrong, so I suspect he’ll have Kaiser Fung coming after him again , once the current lucha with Chabris is over.) Chabris took his swing at Gladwell a few days ago, as I reported here . Yesterday was Gladwell’s turn . I have a lot of sympathy for the Blink-man here: he writes these bestsellers and puts himself out there, so he’s a target. If Gladwell’s books were generic business-bestseller pap of the be-yourself-and-be-tough variety, he wouldn’t get hassled. It
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Introduction: Psychology researcher Chris Chabris writes : Rolf Dobelli, a Swiss writer, published a book called The Art of Thinking Clearly earlier this year with HarperCollins in the U.S. The book’s original German edition was a #1 bestseller, and the book has sold over one million copies worldwide. In perusing Mr. Dobelli’s book, we noticed several familiar-sounding passages. On closer examination, we found five instances of unattributed material that is either reproduced verbatim or closely paraphrased from text and arguments in our book, The Invisible Gorilla (Crown, 2010). They are listed at the end of this note. Apparently he ripped off Nassim Taleb too . A million copies, huh? I guess crime really does pay! Maybe he could get an appointment at Harvard Law School or, if that falls through, a position as writer-in-residence at the statistics department of George Mason University [no link needed for that one -- ed.]. P.S. Chabris notes that there’s an odd coincidence regardin
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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
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Introduction: Our publisher informs me of the exciting news that Amazon is now selling the 3rd edition of our book at 40% off! Enjoy.
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Introduction: Ben points us to a new book, Flexible Imputation of Missing Data . It’s excellent and I highly recommend it. Definitely worth the $89.95. Van Buuren’s book is great even if you don’t end up using the algorithm described in the book (I actually like their approach but I do think there are some limitations with their particular implementation, which is one reason we’re developing our own package ); he supplies lots of intuition, examples, and graphs. P.S. Stef’s book features an introduction by Don Rubin, which gets me thinking: if Don can find the time to write an introduction to somebody else’s book, he surely should be willing to read and comment on the third edition of his own book, no?
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Introduction: Willard Cope Brinton’s second book Graphic Presentation (1939) surprised me with the quality of its graphics. Prof. Michael Stoll has some scans at Flickr . For example: The whole book can be downloaded (in a worse resolution) from Archive.Org .
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Introduction: Psychology researcher Chris Chabris writes : Rolf Dobelli, a Swiss writer, published a book called The Art of Thinking Clearly earlier this year with HarperCollins in the U.S. The book’s original German edition was a #1 bestseller, and the book has sold over one million copies worldwide. In perusing Mr. Dobelli’s book, we noticed several familiar-sounding passages. On closer examination, we found five instances of unattributed material that is either reproduced verbatim or closely paraphrased from text and arguments in our book, The Invisible Gorilla (Crown, 2010). They are listed at the end of this note. Apparently he ripped off Nassim Taleb too . A million copies, huh? I guess crime really does pay! Maybe he could get an appointment at Harvard Law School or, if that falls through, a position as writer-in-residence at the statistics department of George Mason University [no link needed for that one -- ed.]. P.S. Chabris notes that there’s an odd coincidence regardin
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Introduction: Kaiser asks: Trying to figure out what are some keywords to research for this problem I’m trying to solve. I need to estimate seasonality but without historical data. What I have are multiple time series of correlated metrics (think department store sales, movie receipts, etc.) but all of them for 52 weeks only. I’m thinking that if these metrics are all subject to some underlying seasonality, I should be able to estimate that without needing prior years data. My reply: Can I blog this and see if the hive mind responds? I’m not an expert on this one. My first thought is to fit an additive model including date effects, with some sort of spline on the date effects along with day-of-week effects, idiosyncratic date effects (July 4th, Christmas, etc.), and possible interactions. Actually, I’d love to fit something like that in Stan, just to see how it turns out. It could be a tangled mess but it could end up working really well!
3 0.89816993 203 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-12-John McPhee, the Anti-Malcolm
Introduction: This blog is threatening to turn into Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, Social Science, and Literature Criticism, but I’m just going to go with the conversational flow, so here’s another post about an essayist. I’m not a big fan of Janet Malcolm’s essays — and I don’t mean I don’t like her attitude or her pro-murderer attitude, I mean I don’t like them all that much as writing. They’re fine, I read them, they don’t bore me, but I certainly don’t think she’s “our” best essayist. But that’s not a debate I want to have right now, and if I did I’m quite sure most of you wouldn’t want to read it anyway. So instead, I’ll just say something about John McPhee. As all right-thinking people agree, in McPhee’s long career he has written two kinds of books: good, short books, and bad, long books. (He has also written many New Yorker essays, and perhaps other essays for other magazines too; most of these are good, although I haven’t seen any really good recent work from him, and so
4 0.89724946 2207 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-11-My talks in Bristol this Wed and London this Thurs
Introduction: 1. Causality and statistical learning (Wed 12 Feb 2014, 16:00, at University of Bristol): Causal inference is central to the social and biomedical sciences. There are unresolved debates about the meaning of causality and the methods that should be used to measure it. As a statistician, I am trained to say that randomized experiments are a gold standard, yet I have spent almost all my applied career analyzing observational data. In this talk we shall consider various approaches to causal reasoning from the perspective of an applied statistician who recognizes the importance of causal identification, yet must learn from available information. This is a good one. They laughed their asses off when I did it in Ann Arbor. But it has serious stuff too. As George Carlin (or, for that matter, John or Brad) might say, it’s funny because it’s true. Here are some old slides, but I plan to mix in a bit of new material. 2. Theoretical Statistics is the Theory of Applied Statistics
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Introduction: Mark Patterson writes: I found a discussion at the Boston Review that I thought you’d be interested in, given your posts on the potentially dubious foundations of many neoclassical economics models. Michael Sandel cites a few examples of markets crowding out moral behavior. His longest discussion regards Frey and Oberholzer-Gee’s work demonstrating Swiss citizens’ willingness to admit a nuclear waste facility to town decreasing when offered monetary incentives. It seems like this is a situation that really demands a discussion of the available empirical evidence (Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini have two papers, “Pay Enough or Don’t Pay At All” and “A Fine is a Price” that seem especially relevant.) While the essay has sparked the usual sort of libertarian response, I’m struck by the fact that most people aren’t talking about the experimental work that’s actually available—it seems like this is the best way forward. My reply: I don’t have much to add here, but this sort
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