andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2187 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Hey, and I did it in less than 140 characters! The above was my response to this item which David Hogg forwarded to me. The next thing you know, people are going to claim that women are three times as likely to wear red pink when . . . Naaah, forget about it, that would never happen. Hmmm, I think the above is not so savvy of me, to just go around insulting a whole bunch of people. So let me just say that becoming numerate is not as easy as it might seem. All of us can be gullible in areas outside of our expertise. Indeed, I’ve fallen for the occasional April Fool’s gag myself. And, maybe it’s not really right for me to say that “Twitter sucks.” Sure, the downside of Twitter is that people can just pass along a silly joke, not realizing it’s a joke at all. But the upside is, I hope, that once people have committed themselves and then realize they were mistaken, they’ll think harder the next time they see something like that. I hope the same thing goes with the “women
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1 The above was my response to this item which David Hogg forwarded to me. [sent-2, score-0.26]
2 The next thing you know, people are going to claim that women are three times as likely to wear red pink when . [sent-3, score-1.129]
3 Hmmm, I think the above is not so savvy of me, to just go around insulting a whole bunch of people. [sent-7, score-0.436]
4 So let me just say that becoming numerate is not as easy as it might seem. [sent-8, score-0.352]
5 All of us can be gullible in areas outside of our expertise. [sent-9, score-0.346]
6 Indeed, I’ve fallen for the occasional April Fool’s gag myself. [sent-10, score-0.439]
7 And, maybe it’s not really right for me to say that “Twitter sucks. [sent-11, score-0.153]
8 ” Sure, the downside of Twitter is that people can just pass along a silly joke, not realizing it’s a joke at all. [sent-12, score-0.866]
9 But the upside is, I hope, that once people have committed themselves and then realize they were mistaken, they’ll think harder the next time they see something like that. [sent-13, score-0.752]
10 I hope the same thing goes with the “women wearing red pink” study and all the others of that type. [sent-14, score-0.618]
11 It’s too bad that people got sucked in by those sorts of silly claims, but maybe they’ll be more careful next time. [sent-15, score-0.865]
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same-blog 1 1.0 2187 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-26-Twitter sucks, and people are gullible as f…
Introduction: Hey, and I did it in less than 140 characters! The above was my response to this item which David Hogg forwarded to me. The next thing you know, people are going to claim that women are three times as likely to wear red pink when . . . Naaah, forget about it, that would never happen. Hmmm, I think the above is not so savvy of me, to just go around insulting a whole bunch of people. So let me just say that becoming numerate is not as easy as it might seem. All of us can be gullible in areas outside of our expertise. Indeed, I’ve fallen for the occasional April Fool’s gag myself. And, maybe it’s not really right for me to say that “Twitter sucks.” Sure, the downside of Twitter is that people can just pass along a silly joke, not realizing it’s a joke at all. But the upside is, I hope, that once people have committed themselves and then realize they were mistaken, they’ll think harder the next time they see something like that. I hope the same thing goes with the “women
Introduction: In my article about implausible p-values in psychology studies, I wrote: “Women Are More Likely to Wear Red or Pink at Peak Fertility,” by Alec Beall and Jessica Tracy, is based on two samples: a self-selected sample of 100 women from the Internet, and 24 undergraduates at the University of British Columbia. . . . [There is a problem with] representativeness. What color clothing you wear has a lot to do with where you live and who you hang out with. Participants in an Internet survey and University of British Columbia students aren’t particularly representative of much more than … participants in an Internet survey and University of British Columbia students. In response, I received this in an email from a prominent psychology researcher (not someone I know personally): Complaining that subjects in an experiment were not randomly sampled is what freshmen do before they take their first psychology class. I really *hope* you why that is an absurd criticism – especially of au
Introduction: Last week I published in Slate a critique of a paper that appeared in the journal Psychological Science. That paper, by Alec Beall and Jessica Tracy, found that women who were at peak fertility were three times more likely to wear red or pink shirts, compared to women at other points in their menstrual cycles. The study was based an 100 participants on the internet and 24 college students. In my critique, I argued that we had no reason to believe the results generalized to the larger population, because (1) the samples were not representative, (2) the measurements were noisy, (3) the researchers did not use the correct dates of peak fertility, and (4) there were many different comparisons that could have been reported in the data, so there was nothing special about a particular comparison being statistically significant. I likened their paper to other work which I considered flawed for multiple comparisons (too many researcher degrees of freedom), including a claimed relation bet
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Introduction: That cute picture is of toddler FDR in a dress, from 1884. Jeanne Maglaty writes : A Ladies’ Home Journal article [or maybe from a different source, according to a commenter] in June 1918 said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies, according to Paoletti. In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago. Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s . . . When the women’s liberation movement arrived in the mid-1960s, w
Introduction: Are women three times more likely to wear red or pink when they are most fertile? No, probably not. But here’s how hardworking researchers, prestigious scientific journals, and gullible journalists have been fooled into believing so. The paper I’ll be talking about appeared online this month in Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which represents the serious, research-focused (as opposed to therapeutic) end of the psychology profession. . . . In focusing on this (literally) colorful example, I don’t mean to be singling out this particular research team for following what are, unfortunately, standard practices in experimental research. Indeed, that this article was published in a leading journal is evidence that its statistical methods were considered acceptable. Statistics textbooks do warn against multiple comparisons, but there is a tendency for researchers to consider any given comparison alone without considering it as one o
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same-blog 1 0.96297437 2187 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-26-Twitter sucks, and people are gullible as f…
Introduction: Hey, and I did it in less than 140 characters! The above was my response to this item which David Hogg forwarded to me. The next thing you know, people are going to claim that women are three times as likely to wear red pink when . . . Naaah, forget about it, that would never happen. Hmmm, I think the above is not so savvy of me, to just go around insulting a whole bunch of people. So let me just say that becoming numerate is not as easy as it might seem. All of us can be gullible in areas outside of our expertise. Indeed, I’ve fallen for the occasional April Fool’s gag myself. And, maybe it’s not really right for me to say that “Twitter sucks.” Sure, the downside of Twitter is that people can just pass along a silly joke, not realizing it’s a joke at all. But the upside is, I hope, that once people have committed themselves and then realize they were mistaken, they’ll think harder the next time they see something like that. I hope the same thing goes with the “women
Introduction: I’ll be on Radio 4 at 8.40am, on the BBC show “Today,” talking about The Honest Rainmaker . I have no idea how the interview went (it was about 5 minutes), but I’m kicking myself because I was planning to tell the hookah story, but I forgot. Here it is: I was at a panel for the National Institutes of Health evaluating grants. One of the proposals had to do with the study of the effect of water-pipe smoking, the hookah. There was a discussion around the table. The NIH is a United States government organisation; not many people in the US really smoke hookahs; so should we fund it? Someone said, ‘Well actually it’s becoming more popular among the young.’ And if younger people smoke it, they have a longer lifetime exposure, and apparently there is some evidence that the dose you get of carcinogens from hookah smoking might be 20 times the dose of smoking a cigarette. I don’t know the details of the math, but it was a lot. So even if not many people do it, if you multiply the risk, yo
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Introduction: The last time we encountered Slate columnist Shankar Vedantam was when he puzzled over why slightly more than half of voters planned to vote for Republican candidates, given that polls show that Americans dislike the Republican Party even more than they dislike the Democrats. Vedantam attributed the new Republican majority to irrationality and “unconscious bias.” But, actually, this voting behavior is perfectly consistent with there being some moderate voters who prefer divided government. The simple, direct explanation (which Vedantam mistakenly dismisses) actually works fine. I was flipping through Slate today and noticed a new article by Vedantam headlined, “If parenthood sucks, why do we love it? Because we’re addicted.” I don’t like this one either. Vedantam starts by reviewing the evidence that people with kids are less happy than people without kids and that parents report that they are unhappy when they are around their young children. Given this, Vedantam asks
4 0.74420911 2158 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-03-Booze: Been There. Done That.
Introduction: Our research assistants have unearthed the following guest column by H. L. Mencken which appeared in the New York Times of 5 Nov 1933, the date at which Prohibition ended in the United States. As a public service we are reprinting it here. I’m particularly impressed at how the Sage of Baltimore buttressed his article with references to the latest scientific literature of the time. I think you’ll all agree that Mencken’s column, in which he took a stand against the legality of alcohol consumption, has contemporary relevance , more than 80 years later. Because of the challenge of interpreting decades-old references, we have asked a leading scholar of Mencken’s writings to add notes where appropriate, to clarify any points of confusion. And now here’s Mencken’s column (with notes added in brackets), in its entirety: For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I drank alcohol. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of
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Introduction: As many of you know, this blog is on an approximate one-month delay. I schedule my posts to appear roughly once a day, and there’s currently a backlog of about 20 or 30 posts. Recently I’ve decided to spend less time blogging, but I have some ideas I’d still like to share. To tweet, if you will. So I thought I’d just put a bunch of ideas out there that interested readers could follow up on. Think of it like one of those old-style dot-dot-dot newspaper columns. - One thing statisticians could learn from economists: if you want to control for a continuous variable, throw it in as a fifth-order polynomial on the right hand side of a regression. A lot of statisticians will either do simple linear or else spaz out with a spline. But good old polynomials are fine. - One thing that not so many political scientists realize is that nowadays the rich voters are Democrats! You don’t always see that in surveys, but remember that survey nonresponse rates are typically 80%+. Heck,
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same-blog 1 0.97345448 2187 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-26-Twitter sucks, and people are gullible as f…
Introduction: Hey, and I did it in less than 140 characters! The above was my response to this item which David Hogg forwarded to me. The next thing you know, people are going to claim that women are three times as likely to wear red pink when . . . Naaah, forget about it, that would never happen. Hmmm, I think the above is not so savvy of me, to just go around insulting a whole bunch of people. So let me just say that becoming numerate is not as easy as it might seem. All of us can be gullible in areas outside of our expertise. Indeed, I’ve fallen for the occasional April Fool’s gag myself. And, maybe it’s not really right for me to say that “Twitter sucks.” Sure, the downside of Twitter is that people can just pass along a silly joke, not realizing it’s a joke at all. But the upside is, I hope, that once people have committed themselves and then realize they were mistaken, they’ll think harder the next time they see something like that. I hope the same thing goes with the “women
Introduction: Nelson Villoria writes: I find the multilevel approach very useful for a problem I am dealing with, and I was wondering whether you could point me to some references about poolability tests for multilevel models. I am working with time series of cross sectional data and I want to test whether the data supports cross sectional and/or time pooling. In a standard panel data setting I do this with Chow tests and/or CUSUM. Are these ideas directly transferable to the multilevel setting? My reply: I think you should do partial pooling. Once the question arises, just do it. Other models are just special cases. I don’t see the need for any test. That said, if you do a group-level model, you need to consider including group-level averages of individual predictors (see here ). And if the number of groups is small, there can be real gains from using an informative prior distribution on the hierarchical variance parameters. This is something that Jennifer and I do not discuss in our
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Introduction: Bob Erikson, one of my colleagues at Columbia who knows much more about American politics than I do, sent in the following screed. I’ll post Bob’s note, followed by my comments. Bob writes: Monday morning many of us were startled by the following headline: White House strenuously denies NYT report that it is considering getting aggressive about winning the midterm elections. At first I [Bob] thought I was reading the Onion, but no, it was a sarcastic comment on the blog Talking Points Memo. But the gist of the headline appears to be correct. Indeed, the New York Times reported that White House advisers denied that a national ad campaign was being planned. ‘There’s been no discussion of such a thing at the White House’ What do we make of this? Is there some hidden downside to actually running a national campaign? Of course, money spent nationally is not spent on targeted local campaigns. But that is always the case. What explains the Democrats’ trepidation abou
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Introduction: This one’s probably the most important: Republicans on track to retain control of House in 2014 And I like this one for the headline: Impact factor 911 is a joke Here are the others: Press releases make for fishy statistics Why is the Motley Fool hyping Netflix? Our health-care system is like Coca Cola Obama takes big bucks from telecoms, ramps up national security state I have mixed feelings about the move of the Monkey Cage blog to the Washington Post. I’ve been told we get many more readers, but the the comments have declined in number and in quality. It used to be that posting at the Monkey Cage felt like “blogging”: I’d post something there and look at the comments. It was a political science community with many participants from outside the field. Posting at the new blog is more like writing for the newspaper: it’s a broadcast without real feedback. This all makes me realize how much I appreciate the commenters here. Just as I blog for free, out
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Introduction: A recent article on global warming reminded me of the difficulty of letting the data speak. William Nordhaus shows the following graph: And then he writes: One of the reasons that drawing conclusions on temperature trends is tricky is that the historical temperature series is highly volatile, as can be seen in the figure. The presence of short-term volatility requires looking at long-term trends. A useful analogy is the stock market. Suppose an analyst says that because real stock prices have declined over the last decade (which is true), it follows that there is no upward trend. Here again, an examination of the long-term data would quickly show this to be incorrect. The last decade of temperature and stock market data is not representative of the longer-term trends. The finding that global temperatures are rising over the last century-plus is one of the most robust findings of climate science and statistics. I see what he’s saying, but first, I don’t find the st
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