andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2073 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Nurit Baytch posted a document, A Critique of Ron Unz’s Article “The Myth of American Meritocracy” , that is relevant to an ongoing discussion we had on this blog. Baytch’s article begins: In “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” Ron Unz, the publisher of The American Conservative, claimed that Harvard discriminates against non-Jewish white and Asian students in favor of Jewish students. I [Baytch] shall demonstrate that Unz’s conclusion that Jews are over-admitted to Harvard was erroneous, as he relied on faulty assumptions and spurious data: Unz substantially overestimated the percentage of Jews at Harvard while grossly underestimating the percentage of Jews among high academic achievers, when, in fact, there is no discrepancy, as my analysis will show. In addition, Unz’s arguments have proven to be untenable in light of a recent survey of incoming Harvard freshmen conducted by The Harvard Crimson, which found that students who identified as Jewish reported a mean SAT score of 2289
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1 Baytch’s article begins: In “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” Ron Unz, the publisher of The American Conservative, claimed that Harvard discriminates against non-Jewish white and Asian students in favor of Jewish students. [sent-2, score-0.218]
2 Unz’s analysis of Jewish academic achievement is predicated on his ability to identify Jews on the basis of their names, which proved spectacularly wrong for the one data set on which there exists confirmed, peer-reviewed data . [sent-8, score-0.273]
3 This finding was not anomalous, as Unz tried to suggest, for I’ve been able to confirm that Unz also grossly undercounted the number of Jewish students in other data sets of high academic achievers . [sent-11, score-0.337]
4 Several months ago we discussed a claim from Ron Unz that Ivy League colleges discriminate in favor of Jews, a claim that received wide attention after it was featured in the New York Times column of David Brooks . [sent-15, score-0.151]
5 I originally reported statistical Unz’s claims uncritically (as did Tyler Cowen), but after hearing from Janet Mertz and Nurit Baytch, I came to the conclusion that some of Unz’s numbers were way off, enough to invalidate some of his larger points. [sent-16, score-0.11]
6 After some exploration and discussion from all parties, it became clear that Unz had combined different data sources and used different rules of counting in ways that supported his hypothesis. [sent-17, score-0.165]
7 This sort of thing happens: data can be slippery, and that’s one reason why open discussion and critique is so essential in much of science. [sent-18, score-0.168]
8 If you’re joining us right now, it might be best to start with our summary of the discussion as of 18 Mar 2013. [sent-20, score-0.111]
9 She goes into lots of detail in how she performed her estimates and comparisons, and lots more detail on various particular claims that Unz made in his article and in later discussion. [sent-22, score-0.176]
10 Unz’s original numbers appeared authoritative (enough so to fool Cowen, Brooks, and me, along with Unz himself) but they had big errors. [sent-24, score-0.07]
11 To put it another way, Unz put in the effort to compile the statistics for his original article, and then Mertz and Baytch put in the effort to come up with cleaner, better numbers. [sent-25, score-0.221]
12 Many times, initial data seem to show something a pattern disappears in light of better data. [sent-27, score-0.163]
13 As Mertz wrote: Unz considered “five minutes of cursory surname analysis” a sufficient basis on which to claim an important unexpected discovery, i. [sent-28, score-0.169]
14 Most unexpected discoveries are found not to be true when additional analyses are performed to test their validity. [sent-31, score-0.158]
15 It’s perfectly natural to get excited when one’s initial hypothesis is confirmed by an examination of some data, but the next step is to recognize that these exciting discoveries do not always hold up. [sent-32, score-0.165]
16 This isn’t the first time that someone has made a high-profile claim that collapses in light of a careful look at the numbers. [sent-37, score-0.118]
17 Some of the commenters pick up on Baytch’s numbers from the Harvard Crimson. [sent-46, score-0.07]
18 As Baytch discusses, these numbers are consistent with her argument; they are not the basis for her argument. [sent-47, score-0.131]
19 But then I thought, numbers are good, and people can read the whole thing to get all the details. [sent-49, score-0.07]
20 In any case, for those of you who don’t read the whole thing, Batch’s main effort is to use a consistent approach to counting Jewish names so as to get coherent numerators and denominators when computing ratios. [sent-50, score-0.142]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 2073 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-22-Ivy Jew update
Introduction: Nurit Baytch posted a document, A Critique of Ron Unz’s Article “The Myth of American Meritocracy” , that is relevant to an ongoing discussion we had on this blog. Baytch’s article begins: In “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” Ron Unz, the publisher of The American Conservative, claimed that Harvard discriminates against non-Jewish white and Asian students in favor of Jewish students. I [Baytch] shall demonstrate that Unz’s conclusion that Jews are over-admitted to Harvard was erroneous, as he relied on faulty assumptions and spurious data: Unz substantially overestimated the percentage of Jews at Harvard while grossly underestimating the percentage of Jews among high academic achievers, when, in fact, there is no discrepancy, as my analysis will show. In addition, Unz’s arguments have proven to be untenable in light of a recent survey of incoming Harvard freshmen conducted by The Harvard Crimson, which found that students who identified as Jewish reported a mean SAT score of 2289
Introduction: A few months ago we discussed Ron Unz’s claim that Jews are massively overrepresented in Ivy League college admissions, not just in comparison to the general population of college-age Americans, but even in comparison to other white kids with comparable academic ability and preparation. Most of Unz’s article concerns admissions of Asian-Americans, and he also has a proposal to admit certain students at random (see my discussion in the link above). In the present post, I concentrate on the statistics about Jewish students, because this is where I have learned that his statistics are particularly suspect, with various numbers being off by factors of 2 or 4 or more. Unz’s article was discussed, largely favorably, by academic bloggers Tyler Cowen , Steve Hsu , and . . . me! Hsu writes: “Don’t miss the statistical supplement.” But a lot of our trust in those statistics seems to be misplaced. Some people have sent me some information showing serious problems with Unz’s methods
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Introduction: Political/business negotiation vs. scholarly communication. In a negotiation you hold back, you only make concessions if you have to or in exchange for something else. In scholarly communication you look for your own mistakes, you volunteer information to others, and if someone points out a mistake, you learn from it. (Just a couple days ago, in fact, someone sent me an email showing a problem with bayesglm. I ran and altered his code, and it turned out we had a problem. Based on this information, Yu-Sung found and fixed the code. I was grateful to be informed of the problem.) Not all scholarly exchange goes like this, but that’s the ideal. In contrast, openness and transparency are not ideals in politics and business; in many cases they’re not even desired. If Barack Obama and John Boehner are negotiating on the budget, would it be appropriate for one of them to just start off the negotiations by making a bunch of concessions for free? No, of course not. Negotiation doesn
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Introduction: The following is source material regarding our recent discussion of Jewish admission to Ivy League colleges. I’m posting it for the same reason that I earlier posted a message from Ron Unz, out of a goal to allow the data and arguments to be made as clearly as possible. Janet Mertz writes: I became involved in the discussion of Ron Unz’s Meritocracy article because I am a leading expert on the demographics of top-scoring participants in the high school International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the US/Canadian inter-collegiate Putnam Mathematics Competition. I have published three peer-reviewed articles that include data directly related to this topic . . . Had Unz read my 2008 Notices article, he would have known his claim that Jewish achievement in these two competitions had collapsed in the 21st century (which was cited by David Brooks in the New York Times) was simply not true. . . . The primary questions addressed in this article are the following: (i) Do the Ivy
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Introduction: Here. And here’s the story so far: Ron Unz posted a long article on college admissions of Asians and Jews with some numbers and comparisons that made their way into some blogs (including here ) and also a David Brooks NYT column which was read by many people, including Janet Mertz, who’d done previous research on ethnic composition of high-end math students. Mertz contacted me (she’d earlier tried Brooks and others but received no helpful reply), and I posted her findings along with those of another correspondent. Unz then replied , motivating Mertz to write a seven-page document expanding on her earlier emails. Unz responded to that, characterizing Mertz as maybe “emotional” but not actually disputing any of her figures. Unz did, however, make the unconvincing (to me) implication that his original numbers were basically OK even in light of Mertz’s corrections. So Mertz responded once more . (There’s also a side discussion about women’s representation in m
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Introduction: The following is source material regarding our recent discussion of Jewish admission to Ivy League colleges. I’m posting it for the same reason that I earlier posted a message from Ron Unz, out of a goal to allow the data and arguments to be made as clearly as possible. Janet Mertz writes: I became involved in the discussion of Ron Unz’s Meritocracy article because I am a leading expert on the demographics of top-scoring participants in the high school International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the US/Canadian inter-collegiate Putnam Mathematics Competition. I have published three peer-reviewed articles that include data directly related to this topic . . . Had Unz read my 2008 Notices article, he would have known his claim that Jewish achievement in these two competitions had collapsed in the 21st century (which was cited by David Brooks in the New York Times) was simply not true. . . . The primary questions addressed in this article are the following: (i) Do the Ivy
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Introduction: Nurit Baytch posted a document, A Critique of Ron Unz’s Article “The Myth of American Meritocracy” , that is relevant to an ongoing discussion we had on this blog. Baytch’s article begins: In “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” Ron Unz, the publisher of The American Conservative, claimed that Harvard discriminates against non-Jewish white and Asian students in favor of Jewish students. I [Baytch] shall demonstrate that Unz’s conclusion that Jews are over-admitted to Harvard was erroneous, as he relied on faulty assumptions and spurious data: Unz substantially overestimated the percentage of Jews at Harvard while grossly underestimating the percentage of Jews among high academic achievers, when, in fact, there is no discrepancy, as my analysis will show. In addition, Unz’s arguments have proven to be untenable in light of a recent survey of incoming Harvard freshmen conducted by The Harvard Crimson, which found that students who identified as Jewish reported a mean SAT score of 2289
Introduction: A few months ago we discussed Ron Unz’s claim that Jews are massively overrepresented in Ivy League college admissions, not just in comparison to the general population of college-age Americans, but even in comparison to other white kids with comparable academic ability and preparation. Most of Unz’s article concerns admissions of Asian-Americans, and he also has a proposal to admit certain students at random (see my discussion in the link above). In the present post, I concentrate on the statistics about Jewish students, because this is where I have learned that his statistics are particularly suspect, with various numbers being off by factors of 2 or 4 or more. Unz’s article was discussed, largely favorably, by academic bloggers Tyler Cowen , Steve Hsu , and . . . me! Hsu writes: “Don’t miss the statistical supplement.” But a lot of our trust in those statistics seems to be misplaced. Some people have sent me some information showing serious problems with Unz’s methods
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Introduction: I was thinking more about David Brooks’s anti-data column from yesterday, and I realized what is really bothering me. Brooks expresses skepticism about numbers, about the limitations of raw data, about the importance of human thinking. Fine, I agree with all of this, to some extent. But then Brooks turns around uses numbers and unquestioningly and uncritically (OK, not completely uncritically; see P.S. below). In a notorious recent case, Brooks wrote, in the context of college admissions: You’re going to want to argue with Unz’s article all the way along, especially for its narrow, math-test-driven view of merit. But it’s potentially ground-shifting. Unz’s other big point is that Jews are vastly overrepresented at elite universities and that Jewish achievement has collapsed. In the 1970s, for example, 40 percent of top scorers in the Math Olympiad had Jewish names. Now 2.5 percent do. But these numbers are incorrect, as I learned from a professor of oncology at the Univ
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Introduction: Nurit Baytch posted a document, A Critique of Ron Unz’s Article “The Myth of American Meritocracy” , that is relevant to an ongoing discussion we had on this blog. Baytch’s article begins: In “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” Ron Unz, the publisher of The American Conservative, claimed that Harvard discriminates against non-Jewish white and Asian students in favor of Jewish students. I [Baytch] shall demonstrate that Unz’s conclusion that Jews are over-admitted to Harvard was erroneous, as he relied on faulty assumptions and spurious data: Unz substantially overestimated the percentage of Jews at Harvard while grossly underestimating the percentage of Jews among high academic achievers, when, in fact, there is no discrepancy, as my analysis will show. In addition, Unz’s arguments have proven to be untenable in light of a recent survey of incoming Harvard freshmen conducted by The Harvard Crimson, which found that students who identified as Jewish reported a mean SAT score of 2289
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Introduction: The following is source material regarding our recent discussion of Jewish admission to Ivy League colleges. I’m posting it for the same reason that I earlier posted a message from Ron Unz, out of a goal to allow the data and arguments to be made as clearly as possible. Janet Mertz writes: I became involved in the discussion of Ron Unz’s Meritocracy article because I am a leading expert on the demographics of top-scoring participants in the high school International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and the US/Canadian inter-collegiate Putnam Mathematics Competition. I have published three peer-reviewed articles that include data directly related to this topic . . . Had Unz read my 2008 Notices article, he would have known his claim that Jewish achievement in these two competitions had collapsed in the 21st century (which was cited by David Brooks in the New York Times) was simply not true. . . . The primary questions addressed in this article are the following: (i) Do the Ivy
Introduction: A few months ago we discussed Ron Unz’s claim that Jews are massively overrepresented in Ivy League college admissions, not just in comparison to the general population of college-age Americans, but even in comparison to other white kids with comparable academic ability and preparation. Most of Unz’s article concerns admissions of Asian-Americans, and he also has a proposal to admit certain students at random (see my discussion in the link above). In the present post, I concentrate on the statistics about Jewish students, because this is where I have learned that his statistics are particularly suspect, with various numbers being off by factors of 2 or 4 or more. Unz’s article was discussed, largely favorably, by academic bloggers Tyler Cowen , Steve Hsu , and . . . me! Hsu writes: “Don’t miss the statistical supplement.” But a lot of our trust in those statistics seems to be misplaced. Some people have sent me some information showing serious problems with Unz’s methods
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Introduction: Here. And here’s the story so far: Ron Unz posted a long article on college admissions of Asians and Jews with some numbers and comparisons that made their way into some blogs (including here ) and also a David Brooks NYT column which was read by many people, including Janet Mertz, who’d done previous research on ethnic composition of high-end math students. Mertz contacted me (she’d earlier tried Brooks and others but received no helpful reply), and I posted her findings along with those of another correspondent. Unz then replied , motivating Mertz to write a seven-page document expanding on her earlier emails. Unz responded to that, characterizing Mertz as maybe “emotional” but not actually disputing any of her figures. Unz did, however, make the unconvincing (to me) implication that his original numbers were basically OK even in light of Mertz’s corrections. So Mertz responded once more . (There’s also a side discussion about women’s representation in m
Introduction: Howard Wainer writes : When we focus only on the differences between groups, we too easily lose track of the big picture. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the current public discussions of the size of the gap in test scores that is observed between racial groups. It has been noted that in New Jersey the gap between the average scores of white and black students on the well-developed scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has shrunk by only about 25 percent over the past two decades. The conclusion drawn was that even though the change is in the right direction, it is far too slow. But focusing on the difference blinds us to what has been a remarkable success in education over the past 20 years. Although the direction and size of student improvements are considered across many subject areas and many age groups, I will describe just one — 4th grade mathematics. . . . there have been steep gains for both racial groups over this period (somewhat steeper g
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