andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2025 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: I happened to be looking at Slate (I know, I know, but I’d already browsed Gawker and I was desperately avoiding doing real work) and came across this article by Alice Gregory entitled, “I Read Everything Janet Malcolm Ever Published. I’m in awe of her.” I too think Malcolm is an excellent writer, but (a) I’m not happy that she gets off the hook for faking quotes , and (b) I’m really really not happy with her apparent attempt to try to force a mistrial for a convicted killer. I just can’t get over that, for some reason. I can appreciate Picasso’s genius even though he beat his wives or whatever it was he did, I can enjoy the music of Jackson Browne, etc. But for some reason this Malcolm stuff sticks in my craw. There’s no deep meaning to this—I recognize it is a somewhat irrational attitude on my part, I just wanted to share it with you.
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1 I happened to be looking at Slate (I know, I know, but I’d already browsed Gawker and I was desperately avoiding doing real work) and came across this article by Alice Gregory entitled, “I Read Everything Janet Malcolm Ever Published. [sent-1, score-0.582]
2 ” I too think Malcolm is an excellent writer, but (a) I’m not happy that she gets off the hook for faking quotes , and (b) I’m really really not happy with her apparent attempt to try to force a mistrial for a convicted killer. [sent-3, score-1.708]
3 I can appreciate Picasso’s genius even though he beat his wives or whatever it was he did, I can enjoy the music of Jackson Browne, etc. [sent-5, score-0.849]
4 But for some reason this Malcolm stuff sticks in my craw. [sent-6, score-0.229]
5 There’s no deep meaning to this—I recognize it is a somewhat irrational attitude on my part, I just wanted to share it with you. [sent-7, score-0.796]
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same-blog 1 1.0 2025 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-15-The it-gets-me-so-angry-I-can’t-deal-with-it threshold
Introduction: I happened to be looking at Slate (I know, I know, but I’d already browsed Gawker and I was desperately avoiding doing real work) and came across this article by Alice Gregory entitled, “I Read Everything Janet Malcolm Ever Published. I’m in awe of her.” I too think Malcolm is an excellent writer, but (a) I’m not happy that she gets off the hook for faking quotes , and (b) I’m really really not happy with her apparent attempt to try to force a mistrial for a convicted killer. I just can’t get over that, for some reason. I can appreciate Picasso’s genius even though he beat his wives or whatever it was he did, I can enjoy the music of Jackson Browne, etc. But for some reason this Malcolm stuff sticks in my craw. There’s no deep meaning to this—I recognize it is a somewhat irrational attitude on my part, I just wanted to share it with you.
2 0.358904 197 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-10-The last great essayist?
Introduction: I recently read a bizarre article by Janet Malcolm on a murder trial in NYC. What threw me about the article was that the story was utterly commonplace (by the standards of today’s headlines): divorced mom kills ex-husband in a custody dispute over their four-year-old daughter. The only interesting features were (a) the wife was a doctor and the husband were a dentist, the sort of people you’d expect to sue rather than slay, and (b) the wife hired a hitman from within the insular immigrant community that she (and her husband) belonged to. But, really, neither of these was much of a twist. To add to the non-storyness of it all, there were no other suspects, the evidence against the wife and the hitman was overwhelming, and even the high-paid defense lawyers didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to convince anyone of their client’s innocents. (One of the closing arguments was that one aspect of the wife’s story was so ridiculous that it had to be true. In the lawyer’s wo
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Introduction: In our recent discussion of plagiarism and fake quotes, a commenter points to two recent posts by Mark Liberman ( here and here ) where Liberman links to about a zillion cases of journalists publishing quotes that were never said. He goes into some detail about two journalists from the New Yorker: Jared Diamond, who created quotes from a some dude in Papua New Guinea (ironically, one of Diamond’s accusers here is the widow of Stephen Jay Gould), and Janet Malcolm, who not only apparently falsified quotes by a subject of one of her articles, she also may have faked the notes for her interviews. I didn’t know that particular bit about Janet Malcolm, but I’ve felt very uncomfortable about her ever since she her apparent attempt to try to force a mistrial for a convicted killer. Between that case and her earlier The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm really does seem to have some sort of sympathy for people who kill their family members. She’s a good writer, but I still find
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Introduction: A colleague writes: Personally my Kasparov number is two: I beat ** in a regular tournament game, and ** beat Kasparov! That’s pretty impressive, especially given that I didn’t know this guy played chess at all! Anyway, this got me thinking, what’s my Kasparov number? OK, that’s easy. I beat Magnus Carlsen the other day when he was passing through town on vacation, Carlsen beat Anand, . . . OK, just kidding. What is my Kasparov number, though? Note that the definition, unlike that of the Erdos or Bacon numbers, is asymmetric: it has to be that I had a victory over person 1, and person 1 had a victory over person 2, etc., and ultimately person N-1 had a victory over Kasparov. The games don’t have to be in time order, they just all have to be victories. And we’ll further require that the games all be played after childhood and before senility (i.e., it doesn’t count if I happened to play someone who happens to be a cousin of some grandmaster whom he beat when they were b
5 0.071914941 1752 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-06-Online Education and Jazz
Introduction: Alex Tabarrok writes : There is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant. It’s even more true that there is something special, magical and almost sacred about the live musical experience. . . . Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit: Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition. Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences. Excellent points (and Tabarrok has additional good points that I haven’t quoted). We’re not all
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same-blog 1 0.93918729 2025 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-15-The it-gets-me-so-angry-I-can’t-deal-with-it threshold
Introduction: I happened to be looking at Slate (I know, I know, but I’d already browsed Gawker and I was desperately avoiding doing real work) and came across this article by Alice Gregory entitled, “I Read Everything Janet Malcolm Ever Published. I’m in awe of her.” I too think Malcolm is an excellent writer, but (a) I’m not happy that she gets off the hook for faking quotes , and (b) I’m really really not happy with her apparent attempt to try to force a mistrial for a convicted killer. I just can’t get over that, for some reason. I can appreciate Picasso’s genius even though he beat his wives or whatever it was he did, I can enjoy the music of Jackson Browne, etc. But for some reason this Malcolm stuff sticks in my craw. There’s no deep meaning to this—I recognize it is a somewhat irrational attitude on my part, I just wanted to share it with you.
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Introduction: In our recent discussion of plagiarism and fake quotes, a commenter points to two recent posts by Mark Liberman ( here and here ) where Liberman links to about a zillion cases of journalists publishing quotes that were never said. He goes into some detail about two journalists from the New Yorker: Jared Diamond, who created quotes from a some dude in Papua New Guinea (ironically, one of Diamond’s accusers here is the widow of Stephen Jay Gould), and Janet Malcolm, who not only apparently falsified quotes by a subject of one of her articles, she also may have faked the notes for her interviews. I didn’t know that particular bit about Janet Malcolm, but I’ve felt very uncomfortable about her ever since she her apparent attempt to try to force a mistrial for a convicted killer. Between that case and her earlier The Journalist and the Murderer, Malcolm really does seem to have some sort of sympathy for people who kill their family members. She’s a good writer, but I still find
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Introduction: I recently read a bizarre article by Janet Malcolm on a murder trial in NYC. What threw me about the article was that the story was utterly commonplace (by the standards of today’s headlines): divorced mom kills ex-husband in a custody dispute over their four-year-old daughter. The only interesting features were (a) the wife was a doctor and the husband were a dentist, the sort of people you’d expect to sue rather than slay, and (b) the wife hired a hitman from within the insular immigrant community that she (and her husband) belonged to. But, really, neither of these was much of a twist. To add to the non-storyness of it all, there were no other suspects, the evidence against the wife and the hitman was overwhelming, and even the high-paid defense lawyers didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to convince anyone of their client’s innocents. (One of the closing arguments was that one aspect of the wife’s story was so ridiculous that it had to be true. In the lawyer’s wo
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen points to this interesting article by Vasik Rajlich and Frederic Friedel. I find these sorts of things fun to read, but the horrible thing is that I just get worse and worse as a player. I seem to have lost the ability to automatically filter out the worst moves. Not that I was ever any good, but now I can’t seem to go five moves without making a major blunder. I’m seriously thinking about never leaving any pieces unprotected even for a single move, just so I don’t have to worry about forgetting about them. P.S. Further details here .
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Introduction: I was reading a book of Alfred Kazin’s letters—I don’t know if they’d be so interesting to someone who hadn’t already read a bunch of his stuff , but I found them pretty interesting—and came across this amazing bit, dated August 11, 1957: No, really, Al. Tell us what you really feel. This was in his private diary, so I can’t really criticize him for it. And all of us have private thoughts, sometimes publicly expressed, that are unworthy of our better self. For example, once I was crossing a street and a taxi driver came dangerously close, and I screamed at him, “Go back to your own country, you #&@#%*^&.” So I’m not claiming that I’m any better than Kazin. I just thought that quote was pretty amazing. I guess that’s how (some) people thought, back in the fifties. Also interesting that he wrote “ass-hole” in that context. The hyphen surprised me, also I don’t think people would use that word in this way anymore. Nowadays I think of an asshole as a person, not a place.
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Introduction: I happened to be looking at Slate (I know, I know, but I’d already browsed Gawker and I was desperately avoiding doing real work) and came across this article by Alice Gregory entitled, “I Read Everything Janet Malcolm Ever Published. I’m in awe of her.” I too think Malcolm is an excellent writer, but (a) I’m not happy that she gets off the hook for faking quotes , and (b) I’m really really not happy with her apparent attempt to try to force a mistrial for a convicted killer. I just can’t get over that, for some reason. I can appreciate Picasso’s genius even though he beat his wives or whatever it was he did, I can enjoy the music of Jackson Browne, etc. But for some reason this Malcolm stuff sticks in my craw. There’s no deep meaning to this—I recognize it is a somewhat irrational attitude on my part, I just wanted to share it with you.
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Introduction: Richard McElreath writes: I’ve been translating a few ongoing data analysis projects into Stan code, mostly with success. The most important for me right now has been a hierarchical zero-inflated gamma problem. This a “hurdle” model, in which a bernoulli GLM produces zeros/nonzeros, and then a gamma GLM produces the nonzero values, using varying effects correlated with those in the bernoulli process. The data are 20 years of human foraging returns from a subsistence hunting population in Paraguay (the Ache), comprising about 15k hunts in total (Hill & Kintigh. 2009. Current Anthropology 50:369-377). Observed values are kilograms of meat returned to camp. The more complex models contain a 147-by-9 matrix of varying effects (147 unique hunters), as well as imputation of missing values. Originally, I had written the sampler myself in raw R code. It was very slow, but I knew what it was doing at least. Just before Stan version 1.0 was released, I had managed to get JAGS to do it a
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Introduction: I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way about plagiarism that a rich person would feel about counterfeiting: Don’t debase my currency! But it’s more than that. After discussing this a bit with Thomas Basbøll, I realized that I’m bothered by the way that plagiarism interferes with the transmission of information: Much has been written on the ethics of plagiarism. One aspect that has received less notice is plagiarism’s role in corrupting our ability to learn from data: We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work. In statisti
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