andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2023 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: From 1982: The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time. The value of what he does will depend on the quality of his perception, not on the length of his manuscript. Too many dull books about literature would have been tolerably long essays; too many dull long essays would have been reasonably interesting short ones; too many short essays should have been letters to the editor. If the essayist has a literary personality his essay will add up to something all of a piece. If he has not, he may write fancily titled books until doomsday and do no good. Most of the criticism that matters at all has been written in essay form. This fact is no great mystery: what there is to say about literature is very important, but there just isn’t all that much of it. Literature says most things itself, when it is allowed to. Free copy of Stan to the first commenter who identifies the source of the above quote.
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1 From 1982: The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time. [sent-1, score-0.779]
2 The value of what he does will depend on the quality of his perception, not on the length of his manuscript. [sent-2, score-0.384]
3 Too many dull books about literature would have been tolerably long essays; too many dull long essays would have been reasonably interesting short ones; too many short essays should have been letters to the editor. [sent-3, score-3.113]
4 If the essayist has a literary personality his essay will add up to something all of a piece. [sent-4, score-0.928]
5 If he has not, he may write fancily titled books until doomsday and do no good. [sent-5, score-0.562]
6 Most of the criticism that matters at all has been written in essay form. [sent-6, score-0.518]
7 This fact is no great mystery: what there is to say about literature is very important, but there just isn’t all that much of it. [sent-7, score-0.327]
8 Literature says most things itself, when it is allowed to. [sent-8, score-0.217]
9 Free copy of Stan to the first commenter who identifies the source of the above quote. [sent-9, score-0.44]
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same-blog 1 1.0 2023 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-14-On blogging
Introduction: From 1982: The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time. The value of what he does will depend on the quality of his perception, not on the length of his manuscript. Too many dull books about literature would have been tolerably long essays; too many dull long essays would have been reasonably interesting short ones; too many short essays should have been letters to the editor. If the essayist has a literary personality his essay will add up to something all of a piece. If he has not, he may write fancily titled books until doomsday and do no good. Most of the criticism that matters at all has been written in essay form. This fact is no great mystery: what there is to say about literature is very important, but there just isn’t all that much of it. Literature says most things itself, when it is allowed to. Free copy of Stan to the first commenter who identifies the source of the above quote.
2 0.20234779 723 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-21-Literary blurb translation guide
Introduction: “Just like literature, only smaller.”
3 0.12421377 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 0.12098927 34 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-14-Non-academic writings on literature
Introduction: Jenny writes : The Possessed made me [Jenny] think about an interesting workshop-style class I’d like to teach, which would be an undergraduate seminar for students who wanted to find out non-academic ways of writing seriously about literature. The syllabus would include some essays from this book, Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant – and what else? I agree with the commenters that this would be a great class, but . . . I’m confused on the premise. Isn’t there just a huge, huge amount of excellent serious non-academic writing about literature? George Orwell, Mark Twain, Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot (if you like that sort of thing), Anthony Burgess , Mary McCarthy (I think you’d call her nonacademic even though she taught the occasional college course), G. K. Chesterton , etc etc etc? Teaching a course about academic ways of writing seriously about literature would seem much tougher to me.
5 0.10222717 1118 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-14-A model rejection letter
Introduction: Howard Wainer sends in this rejection letter from Sir David Brewster of The Edinburgh Journal of Science to Charles Babbage: It is no inconsiderable degree of reluctance that I decline the offer of any Paper from you. I think, however, you will upon reconsideration of the subject be of the opinion that I have no other alternative. The subjects you propose for a series of Mathematical and Metaphysical Essays are so profound, that there is perhaps not a single subscriber to our Journal who could follow them. Nowadays, he could just submit to Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews . . .
6 0.10100664 1179 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-21-“Readability” as freedom from the actual sensation of reading
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20 0.054266103 1748 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-04-PyStan!
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same-blog 1 0.97556794 2023 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-14-On blogging
Introduction: From 1982: The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time. The value of what he does will depend on the quality of his perception, not on the length of his manuscript. Too many dull books about literature would have been tolerably long essays; too many dull long essays would have been reasonably interesting short ones; too many short essays should have been letters to the editor. If the essayist has a literary personality his essay will add up to something all of a piece. If he has not, he may write fancily titled books until doomsday and do no good. Most of the criticism that matters at all has been written in essay form. This fact is no great mystery: what there is to say about literature is very important, but there just isn’t all that much of it. Literature says most things itself, when it is allowed to. Free copy of Stan to the first commenter who identifies the source of the above quote.
2 0.76831007 4 andrew gelman stats-2010-04-26-Prolefeed
Introduction: From Anthony Burgess’s review of “The Batsford Companion to Popular Literature,” by Victor Neuberg: Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974) was no gentleman. During the 1930s, when he would sometimes have nearly two million words in current publication, he aimed at producing 18,000 words a day. Editors would call me up and ask me to do a novelette by the next afternoon, and I would, but it nearly killed me. . . . I once appeared on the covers of eleven magazines the same month, and then almost killed myself for years trying to make it twelve. I never did. [Masanao: I think you know where I'm heading with that story.] Ursula Bloom, born 1985 and still with us [this was written sometime between 1978 and 1985], is clearly no lady. Writing also under the pseudonyms of Lozania Prole (there’s an honest name for you), Sheila Burnes and Mary Essex, she has produced 486 boooks, beginning with Tiger at the age of seven. . . . Was Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) a gentleman? .
3 0.7457633 2168 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-12-Things that I like that almost nobody else is interested in
Introduction: This post by Jordan Ellenberg (“Stoner represents a certain strain in the mid-century American novel that I really like, and which I don’t think exists in contemporary fiction. Anguish, verbal restraint, weirdness”) reminds me that what I really like is mid-to-late-twentieth-century literary criticism . I read a great book from the 50s, I think it was, by Anthony West (son of Rebecca West and H. G. Wells), who reviewed books for the New Yorker. It was great, and it made me wish that other collections of his reviews had been published (they hadn’t). I’d also love to read collections of Alfred Kazin ‘s reviews (there are some collections, but he published many many others that have never been reprinted) and others of that vintage. I’m pretty sure these hypothetical books wouldn’t sell many copies, though. (I feel lucky, though, that at one point a publisher released a pretty fat collection of Anthony Burgess ‘s book reviews.) It’s actually scary to think that many many more peopl
4 0.72607499 57 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-29-Roth and Amsterdam
Introduction: I used to think that fiction is about making up stories, but in recent years I’ve decided that fiction is really more of a method of telling true stories. One thing fiction allows you to do is explore what-if scenarios. I recently read two books that made me think about this: The Counterlife by Philip Roth and Things We Didn’t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam. Both books are explicitly about contingencies and possibilities: Roth’s tells a sequence of related but contradictory stories involving his Philip Roth-like (of course) protagonist, and Amsterdam’s is based on an alternative present/future. (I picture Amsterdam’s book as being set in Australia, but maybe I’m just imagining this based on my knowledge that the book was written and published in that country.) I found both books fascinating, partly because of the characters’ voices but especially because they both seemed to exemplify George Box’s dictum that to understand a system you have to perturb it. So, yes, literature an
5 0.72590727 285 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-18-Fiction is not for tirades? Tell that to Saul Bellow!
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links approvingly to this review by B. R. Myers of a book that I haven’t read. Unlike Cowen, I haven’t seen the book in question–so far, I’ve only read the excerpt that appeared in the New Yorker–but I can say that I found Myers’s review very annoying. Myers writes: The same narrator who gives us “sucked” and “very into” also deploys compound adjectives, bursts of journalese, and long if syntactically crude sentences. An idiosyncratic mix? Far from it. We find the same insecure style on The Daily Show and in the blogosphere; we overhear it on the subway. It is the style of all who think highly enough of their own brains to worry about being thought “elitist,” not one of the gang. . . . But if Freedom is middlebrow, it is so in the sacrosanct Don DeLillo tradition, which our critical establishment considers central to literature today. . . . Are we to chuckle at the adult woman for writing this in seriousness, or is she mocking her younger self, the teenage ra
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same-blog 1 0.95501196 2023 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-14-On blogging
Introduction: From 1982: The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time. The value of what he does will depend on the quality of his perception, not on the length of his manuscript. Too many dull books about literature would have been tolerably long essays; too many dull long essays would have been reasonably interesting short ones; too many short essays should have been letters to the editor. If the essayist has a literary personality his essay will add up to something all of a piece. If he has not, he may write fancily titled books until doomsday and do no good. Most of the criticism that matters at all has been written in essay form. This fact is no great mystery: what there is to say about literature is very important, but there just isn’t all that much of it. Literature says most things itself, when it is allowed to. Free copy of Stan to the first commenter who identifies the source of the above quote.
Introduction: Justin Kinney writes: Since your blog has discussed the “maximal information coefficient” (MIC) of Reshef et al., I figured you might want to see the critique that Gurinder Atwal and I have posted. In short, Reshef et al.’s central claim that MIC is “equitable” is incorrect. We [Kinney and Atwal] offer mathematical proof that the definition of “equitability” Reshef et al. propose is unsatisfiable—no nontrivial dependence measure, including MIC, has this property. Replicating the simulations in their paper with modestly larger data sets validates this finding. The heuristic notion of equitability, however, can be formalized instead as a self-consistency condition closely related to the Data Processing Inequality. Mutual information satisfies this new definition of equitability but MIC does not. We therefore propose that simply estimating mutual information will, in many cases, provide the sort of dependence measure Reshef et al. seek. For background, here are my two p
3 0.90119648 482 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-23-Capitalism as a form of voluntarism
Introduction: Interesting discussion by Alex Tabarrok (following up on an article by Rebecca Solnit) on the continuum between voluntarism (or, more generally, non-cash transactions) and markets with monetary exchange. I just have a few comments of my own: 1. Solnit writes of “the iceberg economy,” which she characterizes as “based on gift economies, barter, mutual aid, and giving without hope of return . . . the relations between friends, between family members, the activities of volunteers or those who have chosen their vocation on principle rather than for profit.” I just wonder whether “barter” completely fits in here. Maybe it depends on context. Sometimes barter is an informal way of keeping track (you help me and I help you), but in settings of low liquidity I could imagine barter being simply an inefficient way of performing an economic transaction. 2. I am no expert on capitalism but my impression is that it’s not just about “competition and selfishness” but also is related to the
4 0.89931178 1376 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-12-Simple graph WIN: the example of birthday frequencies
Introduction: From Chris Mulligan: The data come from the Center for Disease Control and cover the years 1969-1988. Chris also gives instructions for how to download the data and plot them in R from scratch (in 30 lines of R code)! And now, the background A few months ago I heard about a study reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: I wrote , What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days of the year. It would be easy enough to make. That way we could put the Valentine’s and Halloween data in the context of other possible patterns. While they’re at it, they could also graph births by day of the week and show Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holidays that don’t have fixed dates. It’s so frustrating when people only show part of the story. I was pointed to some tables: and a graph from Matt Stiles: The heatmap is cute but I wanted to se
5 0.89888275 743 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-03-An argument that can’t possibly make sense
Introduction: Tyler Cowen writes : Texas has begun to enforce [a law regarding parallel parking] only recently . . . Up until now, of course, there has been strong net mobility into the state of Texas, so was the previous lack of enforcement so bad? I care not at all about the direction in which people park their cars and I have no opinion on this law, but I have to raise an alarm at Cowen’s argument here. Let me strip it down to its basic form: 1. Until recently, state X had policy A. 2. Up until now, there has been strong net mobility into state X 3. Therefore, the presumption is that policy A is ok. In this particular case, I think we can safely assume that parallel parking regulations have had close to zero impact on the population flows into and out of Texas. More generally, I think logicians could poke some holes into the argument that 1 and 2 above imply 3. For one thing, you could apply this argument to any policy in any state that’s had positive net migration. Hai
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