andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2058 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
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
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 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. [sent-4, score-0.098]
2 But I give Gladwell credit for presenting enough of an idea in his book that there was something worth shooting down. [sent-14, score-0.138]
3 Stone soup As those of you who are social scientists surely already know, ideas are like stone soup. [sent-15, score-0.163]
4 (Amazingly enough, Levitt says he’s spent 5000 hours practicing golf. [sent-20, score-0.123]
5 But if they tell you, “10,000 hours,” then you have to think about it: Hmmm, 40 hours a week for 50 weeks is 2000 hours, so that’s 5 straight years of work. [sent-34, score-0.155]
6 Or 2 and a half years if you’re working at it 16 hours a day. [sent-35, score-0.155]
7 Hmmm, how many hours was Larry Bird standing out there shooting baskets as a kid? [sent-36, score-0.16]
8 A few years ago, I criticized the following passage from Gladwell: It’s one thing to argue that being an outsider can be strategically useful. [sent-40, score-0.093]
9 Suppose that Gladwell is offering nothing but some well-arranged stories and an empty statement that sometimes a humble background can be helpful in achieving success. [sent-55, score-0.266]
10 But if you take his writing as stone soup, maybe it’s valuable: just retreat to the statement that there’s only a weak relationship between draft order and NFL performance. [sent-59, score-0.139]
11 It’s too bad that Gladwell sometimes has to make false general statements in order to get our attention, but maybe that’s what is needed to shake people out of their mental complacency. [sent-61, score-0.142]
12 Gladwell’s villains It’s sometimes said that a good story needs a villain. [sent-75, score-0.168]
13 ) My impression is that, in Gladwell’s stories, the villains are not bad guys, they’re bad ideas. [sent-79, score-0.131]
14 So, in the football example, the villain is the idea that top draft picks will always perform the best. [sent-80, score-0.139]
15 In the 10,000 hours example, the villain is the idea that some people are successes and others are failures, and there’s nothing you can do about it. [sent-81, score-0.259]
16 In the Andrew Carnegie story, the villain is the idea that all that matters is privilege. [sent-82, score-0.106]
17 Sometimes the stories have human heroes (for example, in Gladwell’s (statistically) misleading story of divorce expert John Gottman), Gladwell does not seem to be in the habit of casting people as villains. [sent-83, score-0.146]
18 When I wrote that some of Gladwell’s stories are over-smoothed, my problem was not that Gladwell was not academic, or that he had too much messy reality in his books. [sent-105, score-0.131]
19 Rather, my problem (and, I think, Chabris’s as well) was that Gladwell’s stories were not messy enough! [sent-106, score-0.131]
20 But the point is that to just report that study as truth without mentioning the controversy over its non replication . [sent-112, score-0.113]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('gladwell', 0.8), ('chabris', 0.374), ('hours', 0.123), ('soup', 0.085), ('humble', 0.082), ('stone', 0.078), ('stories', 0.076), ('villain', 0.073), ('goliath', 0.073), ('villains', 0.073), ('levitt', 0.058), ('sometimes', 0.055), ('messy', 0.055), ('background', 0.053), ('cowen', 0.051), ('truth', 0.05), ('fighter', 0.049), ('carnegie', 0.046), ('nfl', 0.041), ('story', 0.04), ('privileged', 0.04), ('steven', 0.038), ('book', 0.038), ('gets', 0.038), ('shooting', 0.037), ('debate', 0.037), ('storytelling', 0.036), ('lesson', 0.036), ('mentioning', 0.035), ('defending', 0.035), ('success', 0.034), ('princeton', 0.034), ('outsider', 0.034), ('draft', 0.033), ('idea', 0.033), ('hmmm', 0.033), ('lot', 0.032), ('pr', 0.032), ('years', 0.032), ('born', 0.031), ('enough', 0.03), ('people', 0.03), ('defense', 0.029), ('thinking', 0.029), ('academic', 0.029), ('bad', 0.029), ('order', 0.028), ('replication', 0.028), ('hour', 0.028), ('thing', 0.027)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000001 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
2 0.54062456 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 0.31164348 2082 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-30-Berri Gladwell Loken football update
Introduction: Sports researcher Dave Berri had a disagreement with a remark in our recent discussion of Malcolm Gladwell. Berri writes: This post [from Gelman] contains the following paragraph: Similarly, when Gladwell claimed that NFL quarterback performance is unrelated to the order they were drafted out of college, he appears to have been wrong. But if you take his writing as stone soup, maybe it’s valuable: just retreat to the statement that there’s only a weak relationship between draft order and NFL performance. That alone is interesting. It’s too bad that Gladwell sometimes has to make false general statements in order to get our attention, but maybe that’s what is needed to shake people out of their mental complacency. The above paragraph links to a blog post by Eric Loken. This is something you have linked to before. And when you linked to it before I tried to explain why Loken’s work is not very good. Since you still think this work shows that Gladwell – and therefore Rob
4 0.23642553 253 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-03-Gladwell vs Pinker
Introduction: I just happened to notice this from last year. Eric Loken writes : Steven Pinker reviewed Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book and criticized him rather harshly for several shortcomings. Gladwell appears to have made things worse for himself in a letter to the editor of the NYT by defending a manifestly weak claim from one of his essays – the claim that NFL quarterback performance is unrelated to the order they were drafted out of college. The reason w [Loken and his colleagues] are implicated is that Pinker identified an earlier blog post of ours as one of three sources he used to challenge Gladwell (yay us!). But Gladwell either misrepresented or misunderstood our post in his response, and admonishes Pinker by saying “we should agree that our differences owe less to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google.” Well, here’s what you can find on Google. Follow this link to request the data for NFL quarterbacks drafted between 1980 and
5 0.12883013 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
6 0.12850228 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
7 0.11230931 1448 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-07-Scientific fraud, double standards and institutions protecting themselves
8 0.097720332 1176 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-19-Standardized writing styles and standardized graphing styles
9 0.081893504 1192 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-02-These people totally don’t know what Chance magazine is all about
11 0.078118734 1100 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-05-Freakonomics: Why ask “What went wrong?”
12 0.076868489 69 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-04-A Wikipedia whitewash
13 0.075774834 1634 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-21-Two reviews of Nate Silver’s new book, from Kaiser Fung and Cathy O’Neil
15 0.070932083 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
16 0.064981103 170 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-29-When is expertise relevant?
17 0.064839289 1832 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The blogroll
18 0.063929997 1650 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-03-Did Steven Levitt really believe in 2008 that Obama “would be the greatest president in history”?
19 0.062927462 2284 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-07-How literature is like statistical reasoning: Kosara on stories. Gelman and Basbøll on stories.
20 0.061565515 1695 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-28-Economists argue about Bayes
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.148), (1, -0.069), (2, -0.029), (3, 0.016), (4, -0.008), (5, -0.018), (6, 0.051), (7, 0.013), (8, 0.042), (9, 0.008), (10, -0.036), (11, -0.017), (12, -0.022), (13, -0.014), (14, -0.004), (15, -0.005), (16, -0.005), (17, 0.044), (18, 0.044), (19, 0.004), (20, -0.026), (21, -0.008), (22, 0.009), (23, -0.002), (24, 0.025), (25, 0.015), (26, 0.05), (27, 0.015), (28, 0.008), (29, -0.012), (30, 0.012), (31, -0.022), (32, -0.012), (33, 0.023), (34, 0.012), (35, 0.01), (36, 0.043), (37, -0.046), (38, 0.009), (39, -0.017), (40, -0.01), (41, -0.013), (42, 0.029), (43, -0.024), (44, 0.005), (45, -0.003), (46, 0.005), (47, -0.018), (48, 0.025), (49, -0.015)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.92442286 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
2 0.86526525 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 0.80309385 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
Introduction: Tyler Cowen discusses his and Bryan Caplan’s reaction to that notorious book by Amy Chua, the Yale law professor who boasts of screaming at her children, calling them “garbage,” not letting them go to the bathroom when they were studying piano, etc. Caplan thinks Chua is deluded (in the sense of not being aware of research showing minimal effects of parenting on children’s intelligence and personality), foolish (in writing a book and making recommendations without trying to lean about the abundant research on child-rearing), and cruel. Cowen takes a middle view in that he doesn’t subscribe to Chua’s parenting strategies but he does think that his friends’ kids will do well (and partly because of his friends’ parenting styles, not just from their genes). Do you view yourself as special? I have a somewhat different take on the matter, an idea that’s been stewing in my mind for awhile, ever since I heard about the Wall Street Journal article that started this all. My story is
5 0.77705532 2189 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-28-History is too important to be left to the history professors
Introduction: From Thomas Laqueur, the Helen Fawcett professor of history at the University of California, reviewing a book by Christopher Clark: [As of 6 July 1914, the German] army made no plans for a general war; the kaiser believed the war would be localized. . . . A last small chance at least to contain a war came with Germany’s decision to force an ultimatum on Belgium [on 2 Aug] to allow it passage through its territory instead of just marching in . . . Huh? Wait one second! It’s pretty funny there, the army invading a neutral country, if they had made no plans for a general war. Setting that aside, let’s review Laqueur’s options for Germany: 1. Force an ultimatum on Belgium (from a web search, I found the details where, among other things, the Germans charmingly offer “to purchase all necessaries for her troops against a cash payment, and to pay an indemnity for any damage that may have been caused by German troops”—but only on the condition that “Belgium adopts a friendly at
6 0.76168829 886 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-02-The new Helen DeWitt novel
7 0.75680149 1319 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-14-I hate to get all Gerd Gigerenzer on you here, but . . .
8 0.75535637 2334 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-14-“The subtle funk of just a little poultry offal”
9 0.75489026 1804 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-15-How effective are football coaches?
10 0.74970037 719 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-19-Everything is Obvious (once you know the answer)
11 0.74551719 1442 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-03-Double standard? Plagiarizing journos get slammed, plagiarizing profs just shrug it off
12 0.74264663 1281 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-25-Dyson’s baffling love of crackpots
13 0.74054694 189 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-06-Proposal for a moratorium on the use of the words “fashionable” and “trendy”
14 0.73597372 1446 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-06-“And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well”
16 0.73472852 2234 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-05-Plagiarism, Arizona style
17 0.73435342 335 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-11-How to think about Lou Dobbs
18 0.73359698 2025 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-15-The it-gets-me-so-angry-I-can’t-deal-with-it threshold
19 0.73239416 1780 andrew gelman stats-2013-03-28-Racism!
20 0.73219925 1616 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-10-John McAfee is a Heinlein hero
topicId topicWeight
[(13, 0.016), (15, 0.016), (16, 0.084), (21, 0.027), (24, 0.118), (30, 0.012), (45, 0.027), (63, 0.01), (73, 0.011), (77, 0.013), (86, 0.165), (89, 0.034), (99, 0.279)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.98610014 253 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-03-Gladwell vs Pinker
Introduction: I just happened to notice this from last year. Eric Loken writes : Steven Pinker reviewed Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book and criticized him rather harshly for several shortcomings. Gladwell appears to have made things worse for himself in a letter to the editor of the NYT by defending a manifestly weak claim from one of his essays – the claim that NFL quarterback performance is unrelated to the order they were drafted out of college. The reason w [Loken and his colleagues] are implicated is that Pinker identified an earlier blog post of ours as one of three sources he used to challenge Gladwell (yay us!). But Gladwell either misrepresented or misunderstood our post in his response, and admonishes Pinker by saying “we should agree that our differences owe less to what can be found in the scientific literature than they do to what can be found on Google.” Well, here’s what you can find on Google. Follow this link to request the data for NFL quarterbacks drafted between 1980 and
2 0.98432356 1547 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-25-College football, voting, and the law of large numbers
Introduction: In an article provocatively entitled, “Will Ohio State’s football team decide who wins the White House?”, Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier report : It is statistically possible that the outcome of a handful of college football games in the right battleground states could determine the race for the White House. Economists Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra, and Cecilia Mo make this argument in a fascinating article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. They examined whether the outcomes of college football games on the eve of elections for presidents, senators, and governors affected the choices voters made. They found that a win by the local team, in the week before an election, raises the vote going to the incumbent by around 1.5 percentage points. When it comes to the 20 highest attendance teams—big athletic programs like the University of Michigan, Oklahoma, and Southern Cal—a victory on the eve of an election pushes the vote for the incumbent up by 3 percentage points. T
3 0.98099005 1718 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-11-Toward a framework for automatic model building
Introduction: Patrick Caldon writes: I saw your recent blog post where you discussed in passing an iterative-chain-of models approach to AI. I essentially built such a thing for my PhD thesis – not in a Bayesian context, but in a logic programming context – and proved it had a few properties and showed how you could solve some toy problems. The important bit of my framework was that at various points you also go and get more data in the process – in a statistical context this might be seen as building a little univariate model on a subset of the data, then iteratively extending into a better model with more data and more independent variables – a generalized forward stepwise regression if you like. It wrapped a proper computational framework around E.M. Gold’s identification/learning in the limit based on a logic my advisor (Eric Martin) had invented. What’s not written up in the thesis is a few months of failed struggle trying to shoehorn some simple statistical inference into this
Introduction: I was given the opportunity to briefly comment on the paper , A Bayesian approach to complex clinical diagnoses: a case-study in child abuse, by Nicky Best, Deborah Ashby, Frank Dunstan, David Foreman, and Neil McIntosh, for the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Here is what I wrote: Best et al. are working on an important applied problem and I have no reason to doubt that their approach is a step forward beyond diagnostic criteria based on point estimation. An attempt at an accurate assessment of variation is important not just for statistical reasons but also because scientists have the duty to convey their uncertainty to the larger world. I am thinking, for example, of discredited claims such as that of the mathematician who claimed to predict divorces with 93% accuracy (Abraham, 2010). Regarding the paper at hand, I thought I would try an experiment in comment-writing. My usual practice is to read the graphs and then go back and clarify any questions through the t
5 0.9738428 1278 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-23-“Any old map will do” meets “God is in every leaf of every tree”
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
6 0.97190773 873 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-26-Luck or knowledge?
7 0.97100043 904 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-13-My wikipedia edit
8 0.97064352 2082 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-30-Berri Gladwell Loken football update
10 0.96989202 276 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-14-Don’t look at just one poll number–unless you really know what you’re doing!
11 0.96801829 759 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-11-“2 level logit with 2 REs & large sample. computational nightmare – please help”
12 0.96534371 76 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-09-Both R and Stata
13 0.96373415 1971 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-07-I doubt they cheated
14 0.96131635 866 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-23-Participate in a research project on combining information for prediction
same-blog 15 0.9589771 2058 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-11-Gladwell and Chabris, David and Goliath, and science writing as stone soup
16 0.9587695 305 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-29-Decision science vs. social psychology
17 0.95787859 1586 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-21-Readings for a two-week segment on Bayesian modeling?
18 0.95675647 1983 andrew gelman stats-2013-08-15-More on AIC, WAIC, etc
19 0.95568573 1266 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-16-Another day, another plagiarist
20 0.95370525 769 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-15-Mr. P by another name . . . is still great!