andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2013 andrew_gelman_stats-2013-2130 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Here I’m using the term “liquidate” in the economics sense (conversion of an asset into cash) rather than the Rocky-and-Bullwinkle sense of the word. Here’s the story: Katherine Chen writes : An executive summary version of Ackman and Dineen’s Powerpoint analysis underscores the potential impact of DSOs [direct selling organizations] upon distributors’ networks: Recruiting family members, friends, work and church acquaintances and others in their communities into a rigged game, one that is highly likely to exact financial and emotional harm on those loved and trusted by them, has an impact that cannot be repaired or recompensed with dollars alone. In class discussions over the years, students have made similar conclusions, with some sharing experiences about how they no longer can socialize with relatives and friends who are members of DSOs because of the relentless pressure to buy and join. Others continue to do part-time work as DSO members who were recruited by family.
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1 Here I’m using the term “liquidate” in the economics sense (conversion of an asset into cash) rather than the Rocky-and-Bullwinkle sense of the word. [sent-1, score-0.333]
2 In class discussions over the years, students have made similar conclusions, with some sharing experiences about how they no longer can socialize with relatives and friends who are members of DSOs because of the relentless pressure to buy and join. [sent-3, score-0.95]
3 Others continue to do part-time work as DSO members who were recruited by family. [sent-4, score-0.35]
4 A multilevel modeling scheme is can be seen as a way of taking apart one’s social network and converting it into (a small amount of) money. [sent-6, score-0.419]
5 In a sense that is true of all frauds and dubious business propositions so maybe there’s nothing special here, it’s just that in modern America the vast majorities of our economic transactions are impersonal and so don’t involve this trading off on connections. [sent-7, score-1.121]
6 There’s been a lot of talk about the role of trust in economic behavior; multilevel marketing is an extreme case in which personal relationships are being used as collateral. [sent-8, score-0.405]
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same-blog 1 1.0000002 2130 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-11-Multilevel marketing as a way of liquidating participants’ social networks
Introduction: Here I’m using the term “liquidate” in the economics sense (conversion of an asset into cash) rather than the Rocky-and-Bullwinkle sense of the word. Here’s the story: Katherine Chen writes : An executive summary version of Ackman and Dineen’s Powerpoint analysis underscores the potential impact of DSOs [direct selling organizations] upon distributors’ networks: Recruiting family members, friends, work and church acquaintances and others in their communities into a rigged game, one that is highly likely to exact financial and emotional harm on those loved and trusted by them, has an impact that cannot be repaired or recompensed with dollars alone. In class discussions over the years, students have made similar conclusions, with some sharing experiences about how they no longer can socialize with relatives and friends who are members of DSOs because of the relentless pressure to buy and join. Others continue to do part-time work as DSO members who were recruited by family.
Introduction: A reporter emailed me the other day with a question about a case I’d never heard of before, a company called Herbalife that is being accused of being a pyramid scheme. The reporter pointed me to this document which describes a survey conducted by “a third party firm called Lieberman Research”: Two independent studies took place using real time (aka “river”) sampling, in which respondents were intercepted across a wide array of websites Sample size of 2,000 adults 18+ matched to U.S. census on age, gender, income, region and ethnicity “River sampling” in this case appears to mean, according to the reporter, that “people were invited into it through online ads.” The survey found that 5% of U.S. households had purchased Herbalife products during the past three months (with a “0.8% margin of error,” ha ha ha). They they did a multiplication and a division to estimate that only 8% of households who bought these products were Herbalife distributors: 480,000 active distributor
3 0.087153882 295 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-25-Clusters with very small numbers of observations
Introduction: James O’Brien writes: How would you explain, to a “classically-trained” hypothesis-tester, that “It’s OK to fit a multilevel model even if some groups have only one observation each”? I [O'Brien] think I understand the logic and the statistical principles at work in this, but I’ve having trouble being clear and persuasive. I also feel like I’m contending with some methodological conventional wisdom here. My reply: I’m so used to this idea that I find it difficult to defend it in some sort of general conceptual way. So let me retreat to a more functional defense, which is that multilevel modeling gives good estimates, especially when the number of observations per group is small. One way to see this in any particular example in through cross-validation. Another way is to consider the alternatives. If you try really hard you can come up with a “classical hypothesis testing” approach which will do as well as the multilevel model. It would just take a lot of work. I’d r
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Introduction: US National Academy of Sciences elects 84 new members (Please click through and read the whole thing.)
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Introduction: Following up on our blog discussions a year ago, I published a review of Charles Murray’s recent book, “Coming Apart,” for the journal Statistics, Politics, and Policy. I invited Murray to publish a response, and he did so. Here’s the abstract to my review : This article examines some claims made in a recent popular book of political sociology, with the intent not being to debunk any claims but rather to connect some important social and policy positions to statistical data on income, social class, and political attitudes. The thesis of Charles Murray’s book is that America’s upper and lower classes have become increasingly separate, with elites living more disciplined, orderly lives (characterized by marriage, work, and stable families) while being largely unaware of the lifestyles of the majority of Americans. I argue that some of Murray’s conclusions are sensitive to particular choices of whom to label as elite or upper-class. From my analysis of survey data, I see the big
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Introduction: Here I’m using the term “liquidate” in the economics sense (conversion of an asset into cash) rather than the Rocky-and-Bullwinkle sense of the word. Here’s the story: Katherine Chen writes : An executive summary version of Ackman and Dineen’s Powerpoint analysis underscores the potential impact of DSOs [direct selling organizations] upon distributors’ networks: Recruiting family members, friends, work and church acquaintances and others in their communities into a rigged game, one that is highly likely to exact financial and emotional harm on those loved and trusted by them, has an impact that cannot be repaired or recompensed with dollars alone. In class discussions over the years, students have made similar conclusions, with some sharing experiences about how they no longer can socialize with relatives and friends who are members of DSOs because of the relentless pressure to buy and join. Others continue to do part-time work as DSO members who were recruited by family.
2 0.72745395 969 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-22-Researching the cost-effectiveness of political lobbying organisations
Introduction: Sally Murray from Giving What We Can writes: We are an organisation that assesses different charitable (/fundable) interventions, to estimate which are the most cost-effective (measured in terms of the improvement of life for people in developing countries gained for every dollar invested). Our research guides and encourages greater donations to the most cost-effective charities we thus identify, and our members have so far pledged a total of $14m to these causes, with many hundreds more relying on our advice in a less formal way. I am specifically researching the cost-effectiveness of political lobbying organisations. We are initially focusing on organisations that lobby for ‘big win’ outcomes such as increased funding of the most cost-effective NTD treatments/ vaccine research, changes to global trade rules (potentially) and more obscure lobbies such as “Keep Antibiotics Working”. We’ve a great deal of respect for your work and the superbly rational way you go about it, and
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Introduction: Philosophy professor Gary Gutting writes : Public policy debates often involve appeals to results of work in social sciences like economics and sociology. . . . How much authority should we give to such work in our policy decisions? . . . The core natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology) are so well established that we readily accept their best-supported conclusions as definitive. . . . But how reliable is even the best work on the effects of teaching? How, for example, does it compare with the best work by biochemists on the effects of light on plant growth? Since humans are much more complex than plants and biochemists have far more refined techniques for studying plants, we may well expect the biochemical work to be far more reliable. . . . While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not. OK, fine. But then comes the punchline: Given the limited predictive success and the lack of consensus in social scienc
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Introduction: People seeking unemployment benefits or welfare would have to first pass a drug test under a proposal Sen. Orrin Hatch will try to add to legislation extending the social safety net during this time of economic turmoil. Hatch … said his idea would help battle drug addiction and could reduce the nation’s debt. He will try to get the Senate to include his amendment to a $140 billion bill extending tax breaks and social programs this week. “This amendment is a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society, while ensuring that valuable taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted,” he said after announcing his amendment. “Too many Americans are locked into a life of a dangerous dependency not only on drugs, but the federal assistance that serves to enable their addiction.” I have a horrible vision of NSF and NIH dollars used to support the amphetamine dependencies of students pulling all-nighters in their bio labs. Something’s gotta be done about this
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Introduction: Nicholas Christakis, a medical scientist perhaps best known for his controversial claim (see also here ), based on joint work with James Fowler, that obesity is contagious, writes : The social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology and political science. This is not only boring but also counterproductive, constraining engagement with the scientific cutting edge and stifling the creation of new and useful knowledge. . . . I’m not suggesting that social scientists stop teaching and investigating classic topics like monopoly power, racial profiling and health inequality. But everyone knows that monopoly power is bad for markets, that people are racially biased and that illness is unequally distributed by social class. There are diminishing returns from the continuing study of many such topics. And repeatedly observing these phenomen
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Introduction: Here I’m using the term “liquidate” in the economics sense (conversion of an asset into cash) rather than the Rocky-and-Bullwinkle sense of the word. Here’s the story: Katherine Chen writes : An executive summary version of Ackman and Dineen’s Powerpoint analysis underscores the potential impact of DSOs [direct selling organizations] upon distributors’ networks: Recruiting family members, friends, work and church acquaintances and others in their communities into a rigged game, one that is highly likely to exact financial and emotional harm on those loved and trusted by them, has an impact that cannot be repaired or recompensed with dollars alone. In class discussions over the years, students have made similar conclusions, with some sharing experiences about how they no longer can socialize with relatives and friends who are members of DSOs because of the relentless pressure to buy and join. Others continue to do part-time work as DSO members who were recruited by family.
2 0.95336992 962 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-17-Death!
Introduction: This graph shows the estimate that Kenny Shirley and I have of support for the death penalty by sex and race in the U.S. since 1955: We also found that capital punishment used to be more popular in the Northeast than in the South, but now it’s the other way around. Here’s the abstract to our paper : One of the longest running questions that has been regularly included in Gallup’s national public opinion poll is “Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?” Because the death penalty is governed by state laws rather than federal laws, it is of special interest to know how public opinion varies by state, and how it has changed over time within each state. In this paper we combine dozens of national polls taken over a fifty-year span and fit a Bayesian multilevel logistic regression model to individual response data to estimate changes in state-level public opinion over time. Such a long span of polls has not been analyzed this way before, partly
3 0.9497391 1083 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-26-The quals and the quants
Introduction: After I recently criticized Gregg Easterbrook for assigning Obama an implausible 90+% chance of beating Mitt Romney, some commenters thought I was being too critical, that I should cut Easterbrook some slack because he just was speaking metaphorically. In other words, Easterbrook is a “qual.” He uses numbers in his writing because that’s what everyone is supposed to do nowadays, but he doesn’t intend those numbers to be meant literally. Similarly, he presumably didn’t really mean it when he wrote that Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren “couldn’t be more different — personally or politically.” And he had no problem typing that Obama’s approval rating was 23% because, to him, “23%” is just another word for “low.” He’s a qual, that’s all. Similarly, when Samantha Power was just being a qual when she wrote the meaningful-sounding but actually empty statement, “Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican pres
4 0.94912827 2182 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-22-Spell-checking example demonstrates key aspects of Bayesian data analysis
Introduction: One of the new examples for the third edition of Bayesian Data Analysis is a spell-checking story. Here it is (just start at 2/3 down on the first page, with “Spelling correction”). I like this example—it demonstrates the Bayesian algebra, also gives a sense of the way that probability models (both “likelihood” and “prior”) are constructed from existing assumptions and data. The models aren’t just specified as a mathematical exercise, they represent some statement about reality. And the problem is close enough to our experience that we can consider ways in which the model can be criticized and improved, all in a simple example that has only three possibilities.
5 0.94749296 1688 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-22-That claim that students whose parents pay for more of college get worse grades
Introduction: Theodore Vasiloudis writes: I came upon this article by Laura Hamilton, an assistant professor in the University of California at Merced, that claims that “The more money that parents provide for higher education, the lower the grades their children earn.” I can’t help but feel that there something wrong with the basis of the study or a confounding factor causing this apparent correlation, and since you often comment on studies on your blog I thought you might find this study interesting. My reply: I have to admit that the description above made me suspicious of the study before I even looked at it. On first thought, I’d expect the effect of parent’s financial contributions to be positive (as they free the student from the need to get a job during college), but not negative. Hamilton argues that “parental investments create a disincentive for student achievement,” which may be—but I’m generally suspicious of arguments in which the rebound is bigger than the main effect.
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