andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2080 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Max Read points to discussions by Cord Jefferson and Tim Krieger about people who write for free, thus depressing the wages of paid journalists. The topic interests me because I’m one of those people who writes for free, all the time. As a commenter wrote in response to Cord Jefferson’s article: It’s not just people who have inherited money, it’s also people who have “day jobs” to support themselves while they pursue dream jobs in fields like journalism, fiction writing, theater and music. In this case, I’m pursuing the dream job of blogging, but it’s the same basic idea. I actually enjoy doing this, which is more than can be said of Tim Kreider, who writes: I will freely admit that writing beats baling hay or going door-to-door for a living, but it’s still shockingly unenjoyable work. I’m lucky enough not to ever have had to bale hay or go door-to-door for a living, but I find writing to be enjoyable! So I can see how it can be hard for Kreider to compete wi
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1 Max Read points to discussions by Cord Jefferson and Tim Krieger about people who write for free, thus depressing the wages of paid journalists. [sent-1, score-0.551]
2 The topic interests me because I’m one of those people who writes for free, all the time. [sent-2, score-0.105]
3 As a commenter wrote in response to Cord Jefferson’s article: It’s not just people who have inherited money, it’s also people who have “day jobs” to support themselves while they pursue dream jobs in fields like journalism, fiction writing, theater and music. [sent-3, score-0.557]
4 In this case, I’m pursuing the dream job of blogging, but it’s the same basic idea. [sent-4, score-0.119]
5 I actually enjoy doing this, which is more than can be said of Tim Kreider, who writes: I will freely admit that writing beats baling hay or going door-to-door for a living, but it’s still shockingly unenjoyable work. [sent-5, score-0.99]
6 I’m lucky enough not to ever have had to bale hay or go door-to-door for a living, but I find writing to be enjoyable! [sent-6, score-0.342]
7 So I can see how it can be hard for Kreider to compete with someone like me who will do what he does for free, while at the same time enjoying it. [sent-7, score-0.067]
8 Kreider also asks: I’ve been trying to understand the mentality that leads people who wouldn’t ask a stranger to give them a keychain or a Twizzler to ask me to write them a thousand words for nothing. [sent-8, score-0.667]
9 I have to admit my empathetic imagination is failing me here. [sent-9, score-0.407]
10 I suppose people who aren’t artists assume that being one must be fun since, after all, we do choose to do it despite the fact that no one pays us. [sent-10, score-0.239]
11 They figure we must be flattered to have someone ask us to do our little thing we already do. [sent-11, score-0.196]
12 I guess he’s kidding here, because the answer to the above question is obvious. [sent-12, score-0.064]
13 Editors ask people like him to write for free because people like me (or Tyler Cowen or Alex Tabarrok, etc. [sent-13, score-0.668]
14 You don’t need much empathetic imagination to figure that one out. [sent-15, score-0.389]
15 That said, I understand the frustration expressed by Jefferson and Kreider. [sent-16, score-0.094]
16 I enjoy doing research, but it’s (typically) hard work. [sent-17, score-0.136]
17 What if I didn’t get paid to do it because there was a reserve army of unemployed statisticians who could do my job for free, and I had to do something else to pay the bills? [sent-18, score-0.452]
18 Somehow, until recently, publications were willing to pay the Tim Krieders of the world to write for them, even though the Andrew Gelmans of the world have been sitting around for awhile willing to write for free. [sent-21, score-0.624]
19 As noted above, even when I do get paid for writing, it’s not much. [sent-23, score-0.169]
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Introduction: Max Read points to discussions by Cord Jefferson and Tim Krieger about people who write for free, thus depressing the wages of paid journalists. The topic interests me because I’m one of those people who writes for free, all the time. As a commenter wrote in response to Cord Jefferson’s article: It’s not just people who have inherited money, it’s also people who have “day jobs” to support themselves while they pursue dream jobs in fields like journalism, fiction writing, theater and music. In this case, I’m pursuing the dream job of blogging, but it’s the same basic idea. I actually enjoy doing this, which is more than can be said of Tim Kreider, who writes: I will freely admit that writing beats baling hay or going door-to-door for a living, but it’s still shockingly unenjoyable work. I’m lucky enough not to ever have had to bale hay or go door-to-door for a living, but I find writing to be enjoyable! So I can see how it can be hard for Kreider to compete wi
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Introduction: Hi all. You may have noticed changes in the appearance of the blog. Cord Blomquist moved us over to this new WordPress blog. He earlier did it for our sister blog and he can do it for you too, for a reasonable fee. We had a few hitches in getting all the files and links and comments working, and Cord was with us all the way to straighten things out. Thanks, Cord! You did a great job and we’re happy to recommend you to others. P.S. The last thing we got working was the RSS feed. So if you’ve been reading the blog on RSS, you have about 3 weeks of backlog you can catch up on. P.P.S. We’re still playing a bit with the blog’s formatting. Feel free to put any formatting suggestions in the comments.
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Introduction: Journalist Jonathan Rauch writes that the internet is Sturgeon squared: This is the blogosphere. I’m not getting paid to be here. I’m here to get incredibly famous (in my case, even more incredibly famous) so that I can get paid somewhere else. . . . The average quality of newspapers and (published) novels is far, far better than the average quality of blog posts (and–ugh!–comments). This is because people pay for newspapers and novels. What distinguishes newspapers and novels is how much does not get published in them, because people won’t pay for it. Payment is a filter, and a pretty good one. Imperfect, of course. But pointing out the defects of the old model is merely changing the subject if the new model is worse. . . . Yes, the new model is bringing a lot of new content into being. But most of it is bad. And it’s displacing a lot of better content, by destroying the business model for quality. Even in the information economy, there’s no free lunch. . . . Yes, there’s g
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Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
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Introduction: Max Read points to discussions by Cord Jefferson and Tim Krieger about people who write for free, thus depressing the wages of paid journalists. The topic interests me because I’m one of those people who writes for free, all the time. As a commenter wrote in response to Cord Jefferson’s article: It’s not just people who have inherited money, it’s also people who have “day jobs” to support themselves while they pursue dream jobs in fields like journalism, fiction writing, theater and music. In this case, I’m pursuing the dream job of blogging, but it’s the same basic idea. I actually enjoy doing this, which is more than can be said of Tim Kreider, who writes: I will freely admit that writing beats baling hay or going door-to-door for a living, but it’s still shockingly unenjoyable work. I’m lucky enough not to ever have had to bale hay or go door-to-door for a living, but I find writing to be enjoyable! So I can see how it can be hard for Kreider to compete wi
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Introduction: I received the following message from “Patricia Lopez” of “Premium Link Ads”: Hello, I am interested in placing a text link on your page: http://andrewgelman.com/2011/07/super_sam_fuld/. The link would point to a page on a website that is relevant to your page and may be useful to your site visitors. We would be happy to compensate you for your time if it is something we are able to work out. The best way to reach me is through a direct response to this email. This will help me get back to you about the right link request. Please let me know if you are interested, and if not thanks for your time. Thanks. Usually I just ignore these, but after our recent discussion I decided to reply. I wrote: How much do you pay? But no answer. I wonder what’s going on? I mean, why bother sending the email in the first place if you’re not going to follow up?
Introduction: Pointing to this news article by Megan McArdle discussing a recent study of Medicaid recipients, Jonathan Falk writes: Forget the interpretation for a moment, and the political spin, but haven’t we reached an interesting point when a journalist says things like: When you do an RCT with more than 12,000 people in it, and your defense of your hypothesis is that maybe the study just didn’t have enough power, what you’re actually saying is “the beneficial effects are probably pretty small”. and A good Bayesian—and aren’t most of us are supposed to be good Bayesians these days?—should be updating in light of this new information. Given this result, what is the likelihood that Obamacare will have a positive impact on the average health of Americans? Every one of us, for or against, should be revising that probability downwards. I’m not saying that you have to revise it to zero; I certainly haven’t. But however high it was yesterday, it should be somewhat lower today. This
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