andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2123 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Paul Kedrosky writes: Curious if you’ve looked at the current debate about Tesla fires, statistically speaking. Lots of arm-waving about true/sample proportions, sample sizes, normal approximations, etc. Would love to see a blog post if it intrigues you at all. I hadn’t heard about this at all! I mean, sure, I’d heard of Tesla, this is an electric car being built by some eccentric billionaire . But I didn’t know they were catching on fire! At this point I was curious so I followed the link. It was an interesting discussion to read, partly because some of the commenters were so open about their financial interests; for example , i felt like now is a good time to share some of my insights, specifically regarding the tesla fires. i know many people won’t like to hear what i have to say. and i don’t have a longer term holding in tesla any more, although sometimes i day-trade tesla from the long or short side. tesla has been kind to me, both as an investor and model s
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Would love to see a blog post if it intrigues you at all. [sent-3, score-0.144]
2 I mean, sure, I’d heard of Tesla, this is an electric car being built by some eccentric billionaire . [sent-5, score-0.514]
3 At this point I was curious so I followed the link. [sent-7, score-0.079]
4 It was an interesting discussion to read, partly because some of the commenters were so open about their financial interests; for example , i felt like now is a good time to share some of my insights, specifically regarding the tesla fires. [sent-8, score-0.913]
5 and i don’t have a longer term holding in tesla any more, although sometimes i day-trade tesla from the long or short side. [sent-10, score-1.544]
6 tesla has been kind to me, both as an investor and model s owner. [sent-11, score-0.77]
7 so although i have been very tempted to short tesla the past months, i just can’t bring myself to establish a meaningful short against the company that has been so good to me as a customer and investor. [sent-12, score-1.119]
8 who knows, maybe i will lose my sentimentality and return to being the cold-blooded capitalist i usually am. [sent-13, score-0.138]
9 I love the idea that someone thinks that day trading is “being a cold-blooded capitalist,” but that’s another story. [sent-14, score-0.123]
10 What’s unusual in this discussion is how openly people are stating their financial and emotional interests here. [sent-18, score-0.384]
11 After reading some of the thread and googling a bit, I don’t think I have much to add that goes beyond this news article and this one by Kevin Bullis. [sent-19, score-0.057]
12 We’re talking about a rare event: specifically, a car catching on fire after a collision. [sent-20, score-0.643]
13 In which case it seems like the overwhelming risk comes from the crash, not the possibility of fire. [sent-21, score-0.074]
14 What interests me the most about all this is that it ultimately seems not so much like a discussion of added risks (which, everyone seems to agree, are tiny, to the extent that they exist at all) but rather more of a meta-discussion about risk perception. [sent-22, score-0.263]
15 The argument is not that the Tesla car is dangerous but rather that it will be perceived as dangerous, thus dropping its inflated stock price etc. [sent-23, score-0.525]
16 It’s an argument and a meta-argument at the same time. [sent-24, score-0.059]
17 We were on the highway outside Baltimore and noticed that some other drivers were pointing at our car as they zoomed past. [sent-29, score-0.385]
18 After pulling over, we noticed smoke coming from under the hood. [sent-30, score-0.193]
19 It turned out we’d forgotten to put the cap back on after filling the oil tank, and there was a small fire burning on the surface of the oil. [sent-31, score-0.604]
20 We waited for the fire to go out and then drove slowly to a gas station. [sent-32, score-0.456]
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same-blog 1 1.0 2123 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-04-Tesla fires!
Introduction: Paul Kedrosky writes: Curious if you’ve looked at the current debate about Tesla fires, statistically speaking. Lots of arm-waving about true/sample proportions, sample sizes, normal approximations, etc. Would love to see a blog post if it intrigues you at all. I hadn’t heard about this at all! I mean, sure, I’d heard of Tesla, this is an electric car being built by some eccentric billionaire . But I didn’t know they were catching on fire! At this point I was curious so I followed the link. It was an interesting discussion to read, partly because some of the commenters were so open about their financial interests; for example , i felt like now is a good time to share some of my insights, specifically regarding the tesla fires. i know many people won’t like to hear what i have to say. and i don’t have a longer term holding in tesla any more, although sometimes i day-trade tesla from the long or short side. tesla has been kind to me, both as an investor and model s
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Introduction: This entry was posted by Phil Price. A colleague is looking at data on car (and SUV and light truck) collisions and casualties. He’s interested in causal relationships. For instance, suppose car manufacturers try to improve gas mileage without decreasing acceleration. The most likely way they will do that is to make cars lighter. But perhaps lighter cars are more dangerous; how many more people will die for each mpg increase in gas mileage? There are a few different data sources, all of them seriously deficient from the standpoint of answering this question. Deaths are very well reported, so if someone dies in an auto accident you can find out what kind of car they were in, what other kinds of cars (if any) were involved in the accident, whether the person was a driver or passenger, and so on. But it’s hard to normalize: OK, I know that N people who were passengers in a particular model of car died in car accidents last year, but I don’t know how many passenger-miles that
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Introduction: Following up on our earlier discussion, Daniel Rubenson from Ryerson University in Toronto writes: The course went really well (it was a couple of years ago now). The course was run through a partnership my department has with the Ontario Fire College. Basically, firefighters can do a certificate and sometimes a degree in public administration and part of that is a course on methods. It was a small group — about 8 or so — very motivated guys (all guys). Some of them were chiefs or deputy chiefs from small towns, others captains who were doing the certificate in order to improve their chances for promotion or as a step into a broader public admin career. I had asked them ahead of time to bring with them whatever data they could get their hands on and that they thought would be interesting. This included response times, data on professional v voluntary firefighters, some insurance data and the like. I should mention that is was an intensive mode course. So we had 4.5 days toge
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Introduction: Cassie Murdoch reports : A 47-year-old woman in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, got behind the wheel of her car after having a bit too much to drink, but instead of wreaking havoc on the road, she ended up lodged in a sand trap at a local golf course. Why? Because her GPS made her do it—obviously! She said the GPS told her to turn left, and she did, right into a cornfield. That didn’t faze her, and she just kept on going until she ended up on the golf course and got stuck in the sand. There were people on the course at the time, but thankfully nobody was injured. Police found a cup full of alcohol in her car and arrested her for driving drunk. Here’s the punchline: This is the fourth time she’s been arrested for a DUI. Assuming this story is accurate, I guess they don’t have one of those “three strikes” laws in Massachusetts? Personally, I’m a lot more afraid of a dangerous driver than of some drug dealer. I’d think a simple cost-benefit calculation would recommend taking away
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Introduction: Paul Kedrosky writes: Curious if you’ve looked at the current debate about Tesla fires, statistically speaking. Lots of arm-waving about true/sample proportions, sample sizes, normal approximations, etc. Would love to see a blog post if it intrigues you at all. I hadn’t heard about this at all! I mean, sure, I’d heard of Tesla, this is an electric car being built by some eccentric billionaire . But I didn’t know they were catching on fire! At this point I was curious so I followed the link. It was an interesting discussion to read, partly because some of the commenters were so open about their financial interests; for example , i felt like now is a good time to share some of my insights, specifically regarding the tesla fires. i know many people won’t like to hear what i have to say. and i don’t have a longer term holding in tesla any more, although sometimes i day-trade tesla from the long or short side. tesla has been kind to me, both as an investor and model s
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Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. An Oregon legislator, Mitch Greenlick, has proposed to make it illegal in Oregon to carry a child under six years old on one’s bike (including in a child seat) or in a bike trailer. The guy says “”We’ve just done a study showing that 30 percent of riders biking to work at least three days a week have some sort of crash that leads to an injury… When that’s going on out there, what happens when you have a four year old on the back of a bike?” The study is from Oregon Health Sciences University, at which the legislator is a professor. Greenlick also says “”If it’s true that it’s unsafe, we have an obligation to protect people. If I thought a law would save one child’s life, I would step in and do it. Wouldn’t you?” There are two statistical issues here. The first is in the category of “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” and involves the statement about how many riders have injuries. As quoted on a blog , the author of the study in question says th
Introduction: Ever since I got this new sound system for my bike, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. This American Life is really good. I know, I know, everybody knows that, but it’s true. The only segments I don’t like are the ones that are too “writerly,” when they read a short story aloud. They don’t work for me. Most of the time, though, the show is as great as everyone says it is. Anyway, the other day I listened to program #466: Blackjack . It started with some items on card counting. That stuff is always fun. Then they get to the longer story, which is all about a moderately rich housewife from Iowa who, over a roughly ten-year period, lost her life savings, something like a million dollars, at Harrah’s casinos. Did you know they had casinos in Iowa and Indiana? I didn’t. Anyway, the lady was a gambling addict. That part’s pretty clear. You don’t lose your life savings at a casino by accident. The scary part, though, was how the casino company craftily enabled her to
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Introduction: My econ dept colleague Joseph Stiglitz suggests that financial fraudsters be sent to prison. He points out that the usual penalty–million-dollar fines–just isn’t enough for crimes whose rewards can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. That all makes sense, but why do the options have to be: 1. No punishment 2. A fine with little punishment or deterrent value 3. Prison. What’s the point of putting nonviolent criminals in prison? As I’ve said before , I’d prefer if the government just took all these convicted thieves’ assets along with 95% of their salary for several years, made them do community service (sorting bottles and cans at the local dump, perhaps; a financier should be good at this sort of thing, no?), etc. If restriction of personal freedom is judged be part of the sentence, they could be given some sort of electronic tag that would send a message to the police if you are ever more than 3 miles from your home. And a curfew so you have to stay home bet
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Introduction: Speaking of Tyler Cowen, I’m puzzled by this paragraph of his: Guns, like alcohol, have many legitimate uses, and they are enjoyed by many people in a responsible manner. In both cases, there is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else. I don’t know anything about guns so I’ll set that part aside. My bafflement is with the claim that “there is an elite which has absolutely no problem handling [alcohol].” Is he kidding? Unless Cowen is circularly defining “an elite” as the subset of elites who don’t have an alcohol problem, I don’t buy this claim. And I actually think it’s a serious problem, that various “elites” are so sure that they have “absolutely no problem” that they do dangerous, dangerous things. Consider the notorious incident when Dick Cheney shot a
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Introduction: Paul Kedrosky writes: Curious if you’ve looked at the current debate about Tesla fires, statistically speaking. Lots of arm-waving about true/sample proportions, sample sizes, normal approximations, etc. Would love to see a blog post if it intrigues you at all. I hadn’t heard about this at all! I mean, sure, I’d heard of Tesla, this is an electric car being built by some eccentric billionaire . But I didn’t know they were catching on fire! At this point I was curious so I followed the link. It was an interesting discussion to read, partly because some of the commenters were so open about their financial interests; for example , i felt like now is a good time to share some of my insights, specifically regarding the tesla fires. i know many people won’t like to hear what i have to say. and i don’t have a longer term holding in tesla any more, although sometimes i day-trade tesla from the long or short side. tesla has been kind to me, both as an investor and model s
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Introduction: In the annals of hack literature, it is sometimes said that if you aim to write best-selling crap, all you’ll end up with is crap. To truly produce best-selling crap, you have to have a conviction, perhaps misplaced, that your writing has integrity. Whether or not this is a good generalization about writing, I have seen an analogous phenomenon in statistics: If you try to do nothing but model the data, you can be in for a wild and unpleasant ride: real data always seem to have one more twist beyond our ability to model (von Neumann’s elephant’s trunk notwithstanding). But if you model the underlying process, sometimes your model can fit surprisingly well as well as inviting openings for future research progress.
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