andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2184 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: God is in every leaf of every tree , but he is not in every leaf of every parable. Let me explain with a story. A few months ago I read the new book, Doing Data Science, by Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neal, and I came across the following motivation for comprehensive integration of data sources, a story that is reminiscent of the parables we sometimes see in business books: By some estimates, one or two patients died per week in a certain smallish town because of the lack of information flow between the hospital’s emergency room and the nearby mental health clinic. In other words, if the records had been easier to match, they’d have been able to save more lives. On the other hand, if it had been easy to match records, other breaches of confidence might also have occurred. Of course it’s hard to know exactly how many lives are at stake, but it’s nontrivial. The moral: We can assume we think privacy is a generally good thing. . . . But privacy takes lives too, as we see from
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1 God is in every leaf of every tree , but he is not in every leaf of every parable. [sent-1, score-0.811]
2 But privacy takes lives too, as we see from this story of emergency room deaths. [sent-11, score-0.544]
3 Here’s Wikipedia: “A town is a human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. [sent-17, score-0.607]
4 In the United States of America, the term “town” refers to an area of population distinct from others in some meaningful dimension, typically population or type of government. [sent-22, score-0.405]
5 In some instances, the term “town” refers to a small incorporated municipality of less than 10,000 people, while in others a town can be significantly larger. [sent-26, score-0.907]
6 Some states do not use the term ‘town’ at all, while in others the term has no official meaning and is used informally to refer to a populated place, of any size, whether incorporated or unincorporated. [sent-27, score-0.39]
7 If approximately 1/70 of the population is dying every year, that’s 140 deaths a year. [sent-34, score-0.386]
8 So that can’t be right—there’s no way that half the deaths in this town are caused by poor record-keeping in a hospital. [sent-35, score-0.7]
9 If the town had 20,000 people (which would seem to be near the upper limit of the population of a town that one would call “smallish,” at least in the United States), then we’re talking 1/4 of the deaths, which still seems way too large a proportion. [sent-36, score-1.233]
10 Even if it is a town with lots of old people, so that much more than 1/70 of the population is dropping off each year, the numbers just don’t seem to add up. [sent-37, score-0.678]
11 Based on my calculations, I feel like there is something missing in the story that was told about the hospital records. [sent-41, score-0.426]
12 It’s hard for me to know, though, because the story is not sourced. [sent-44, score-0.241]
13 My point is that, if we want to truly learn from a story, in the “God is in every leaf of every tree” sense, we can’t just relax and soak in the message, we need to push push push. [sent-47, score-0.503]
14 I don’t know what’s going on here, whether the story is entirely made up or maybe the numbers got garbled and are off by one or two orders of magnitude or maybe two stories got mashed up and something was lost in translation, or maybe there’s some key aspect I’m not understanding. [sent-48, score-0.518]
15 Without sourcing, without any way to get more information, we don’t have a story at all, we have a parable. [sent-51, score-0.241]
16 Here’s Webster: par·a·ble noun \ˈpa-rə-bəl\ : a short story that teaches a moral or spiritual lesson; especially : one of the stories told by Jesus Christ and recorded in the Bible . [sent-52, score-0.579]
17 specifically : a usually short fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude or a religious principle OK, so there’s nothing religious in this parable (nothing about Bayes or Emacs or Linux, yuk yuk yuk) but, yes, it illustrates a moral attitude. [sent-55, score-1.309]
18 If deeper investigation into the parable were to change or complexify its message, that would defeat the purpose. [sent-59, score-0.304]
19 Indeed, for the purpose of writing a general-interest book, maybe a parable works better than an endlessly-complexifying story. [sent-64, score-0.355]
20 But I think it’s been a good real-life story to illustrate the distinction between parables and real-life stories. [sent-66, score-0.35]
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