andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2225 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: An anonymous reviewer wrote: I appreciate informal writing styles as a means of increasing accessibility. However, the informality here seems to decrease accessibility – partly because of the assumed knowledge of the reader for concepts and terms, and also for its wandering style. Many concepts are introduced without explanation and are not clearly and decisively linked in developing a narrative argument. I think the prose and argumentation would be much stronger if ideas were introduced and developed more deliberately and not assuming insider knowledge of the reader. Good point. I have an informal writing style and that often works well, even for technical papers. But sometimes an informal paper is harder to follow for readers without the background knowledge. Paradoxically, a more stilted style with lots of notation and many stops to make precise definitions, can be more readable for the less-than-expert audience.
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1 An anonymous reviewer wrote: I appreciate informal writing styles as a means of increasing accessibility. [sent-1, score-1.168]
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6 But sometimes an informal paper is harder to follow for readers without the background knowledge. [sent-7, score-0.804]
7 Paradoxically, a more stilted style with lots of notation and many stops to make precise definitions, can be more readable for the less-than-expert audience. [sent-8, score-0.975]
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same-blog 1 0.99999976 2225 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-26-A good comment on one of my papers
Introduction: An anonymous reviewer wrote: I appreciate informal writing styles as a means of increasing accessibility. However, the informality here seems to decrease accessibility – partly because of the assumed knowledge of the reader for concepts and terms, and also for its wandering style. Many concepts are introduced without explanation and are not clearly and decisively linked in developing a narrative argument. I think the prose and argumentation would be much stronger if ideas were introduced and developed more deliberately and not assuming insider knowledge of the reader. Good point. I have an informal writing style and that often works well, even for technical papers. But sometimes an informal paper is harder to follow for readers without the background knowledge. Paradoxically, a more stilted style with lots of notation and many stops to make precise definitions, can be more readable for the less-than-expert audience.
2 0.12651934 1176 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-19-Standardized writing styles and standardized graphing styles
Introduction: Back in the 1700s—JennyD can correct me if I’m wrong here—there was no standard style for writing. You could be discursive, you could be descriptive, flowery, or terse. Direct or indirect, serious or funny. You could construct a novel out of letters or write a philosophical treatise in the form of a novel. Nowadays there are rules. You can break the rules, but then you’re Breaking. The. Rules. Which is a distinctive choice all its own. Consider academic writing. Serious works of economics or statistics tend to be written in a serious style in some version of plain academic English. The few exceptions (for example, by Tukey, Tufte, Mandelbrot, and Jaynes) are clearly exceptions, written in styles that are much celebrated but not so commonly followed. A serious work of statistics, or economics, or political science could be written in a highly unconventional form (consider, for example, Wallace Shawn’s plays), but academic writers in these fields tend to stick with the sta
3 0.12622923 1658 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-07-Free advice from an academic writing coach!
Introduction: Basbøll writes : I [Basbøll] have got to come up with forty things to say [in the next few months]. . . . What would you like me to write about? I’ll of course be writing quite a bit about what I’m now calling “article design”, i.e., how to map out the roughly forty paragraphs that a journal article is composed of. And I’ll also be talking about how to plan the writing process that is to produce those paragraphs. The basic principle is still to write at least one paragraph a day in 27 minutes. (You can adapt this is various ways to your own taste; some like 18-minute or even 13-minute paragraphs.) But I’d like to talk about questions of style, too, and even a little bit about epistemology. “Knowledge—academic knowledge, that is—is the ability to compose a coherent prose paragraph about something in 27 minutes,” I always say. I’d like to reflect a little more about what this conception of knowledge really means. This means I’ll have to walk back my recent dismissal of epistemol
Introduction: Jonathan Robinson writes: I’m a survey researcher who mostly does political work, but I also have a strong interest in economics. I have a question about this graph you commonly see in the economics literature. It is of a concept called the Beveridge Curve [recently in the newspaper here ]. It is one of the more interesting concepts in labor economics, relating the vacancy rate in jobs to the unemployment rate. A good primer is here . However, despite being one of the more interesting concepts in economics, the way it is displayed visually is nothing short of atrocious: These graphs are nothing short of unreadable and pretty much the standard (Brad Delong has linked to this graph above and it can appear like this in publication as well). I’ve only really seen one representation of the curve that is more clear than this and it is at this link : Do you have any ideas of any way of making these graphs more readable? I like the second Cleveland Fed graph, but I ha
5 0.092441231 1202 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-08-Between and within-Krugman correlation
Introduction: I just wanted to point out this comment of mine which applies the principles of analysis of variance to an informal model of political opinions and intellectual stances. I hate it when my best lines are buried within a comment thread. (I also hate that I respond to blog comments rather than doing real work, but that’s another story. One of the good things about blogging for 538, back when I was doing that, was that the comments were soooo bad I just stopped reading them. Commenters here often have something interesting to say.) P.S. See also here .
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same-blog 1 0.96437073 2225 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-26-A good comment on one of my papers
Introduction: An anonymous reviewer wrote: I appreciate informal writing styles as a means of increasing accessibility. However, the informality here seems to decrease accessibility – partly because of the assumed knowledge of the reader for concepts and terms, and also for its wandering style. Many concepts are introduced without explanation and are not clearly and decisively linked in developing a narrative argument. I think the prose and argumentation would be much stronger if ideas were introduced and developed more deliberately and not assuming insider knowledge of the reader. Good point. I have an informal writing style and that often works well, even for technical papers. But sometimes an informal paper is harder to follow for readers without the background knowledge. Paradoxically, a more stilted style with lots of notation and many stops to make precise definitions, can be more readable for the less-than-expert audience.
2 0.71550256 1658 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-07-Free advice from an academic writing coach!
Introduction: Basbøll writes : I [Basbøll] have got to come up with forty things to say [in the next few months]. . . . What would you like me to write about? I’ll of course be writing quite a bit about what I’m now calling “article design”, i.e., how to map out the roughly forty paragraphs that a journal article is composed of. And I’ll also be talking about how to plan the writing process that is to produce those paragraphs. The basic principle is still to write at least one paragraph a day in 27 minutes. (You can adapt this is various ways to your own taste; some like 18-minute or even 13-minute paragraphs.) But I’d like to talk about questions of style, too, and even a little bit about epistemology. “Knowledge—academic knowledge, that is—is the ability to compose a coherent prose paragraph about something in 27 minutes,” I always say. I’d like to reflect a little more about what this conception of knowledge really means. This means I’ll have to walk back my recent dismissal of epistemol
3 0.71233958 49 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-24-Blogging
Introduction: Rajiv Sethi quotes Bentley University economics professor Scott Sumner writing on the first anniversary of his blog: Be careful what you wish for. Last February 2nd I [Sumner] started this blog with very low expectations… I knew I wasn’t a good writer . . . And I was also pretty sure that the content was not of much interest to anyone. Now my biggest problem is time–I spend 6 to 10 hours a day on the blog, seven days a week. Several hours are spent responding to reader comments and the rest is spent writing long-winded posts and checking other economics blogs. . . . I [Sumner] don’t think much of the official methodology in macroeconomics. Many of my fellow economists seem to have a Popperian view of the social sciences. You develop a model. You go out and get some data. And then you try to refute the model with some sort of regression analysis. . . . My problem with this view is that it doesn’t reflect the way macro and finance actually work. Instead the models are
4 0.70784646 2023 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-14-On blogging
Introduction: From 1982: The necessary conceit of the essayist must be that in writing down what is obvious to him he is not wasting his reader’s time. The value of what he does will depend on the quality of his perception, not on the length of his manuscript. Too many dull books about literature would have been tolerably long essays; too many dull long essays would have been reasonably interesting short ones; too many short essays should have been letters to the editor. If the essayist has a literary personality his essay will add up to something all of a piece. If he has not, he may write fancily titled books until doomsday and do no good. Most of the criticism that matters at all has been written in essay form. This fact is no great mystery: what there is to say about literature is very important, but there just isn’t all that much of it. Literature says most things itself, when it is allowed to. Free copy of Stan to the first commenter who identifies the source of the above quote.
5 0.70134491 1508 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-23-Speaking frankly
Introduction: Even within the realm of writing-about-statistics, there are things I can say in a blog that are much more difficult to include in an academic article. Blogging gives me freedom. But I want to distinguish between two different sorts of frankness. 1. Obnoxiousness: In a blog I can write, “I hate X” as rudely as I’d like without needing to justify myself. 2. Openness: In a blog I can write about the limitations of my work. It’s a real challenge to discuss limitations in a scholarly article, as we’re always looking over our shoulder at what referees might think. Sure, sometimes I can get away with writing “Survey weighting is a mess,” but my impression is that most scholarly articles are relentlessly upbeat. Sort of like how a magazine article typically will have a theme and just plug it over and over. In a blog we can more easily admit uncertainty. Overall, I think blogs are more celebrated for feature 1 above (the freedom to say what you really feel, to be rude, par
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same-blog 1 0.89877522 2225 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-26-A good comment on one of my papers
Introduction: An anonymous reviewer wrote: I appreciate informal writing styles as a means of increasing accessibility. However, the informality here seems to decrease accessibility – partly because of the assumed knowledge of the reader for concepts and terms, and also for its wandering style. Many concepts are introduced without explanation and are not clearly and decisively linked in developing a narrative argument. I think the prose and argumentation would be much stronger if ideas were introduced and developed more deliberately and not assuming insider knowledge of the reader. Good point. I have an informal writing style and that often works well, even for technical papers. But sometimes an informal paper is harder to follow for readers without the background knowledge. Paradoxically, a more stilted style with lots of notation and many stops to make precise definitions, can be more readable for the less-than-expert audience.
Introduction: I received the following email: I am trying to develop a Bayesian model to represent the process through which individual consumers make online product rating decisions. In my model each individual faces total J product options and for each product option (j) each individual (i) needs to make three sequential decisions: - First he decides whether to consume a specific product option (j) or not (choice decision) - If he decides to consume a product option j, then after consumption he decides whether to rate it or not (incidence decision) - If he decides to rate product j then what finally he decides what rating (k) to assign to it (evaluation decision) We model this decision sequence in terms of three equations. A binary response variable in the first equation represents the choice decision. Another binary response variable in the second equation represents the incidence decision that is observable only when first selection decision is 1. Finally, an ordered response v
3 0.7490074 1332 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-20-Problemen met het boek
Introduction: Regarding the so-called Dutch Book argument for Bayesian inference (the idea that, if your inferences do not correspond to a Bayesian posterior distribution, you can be forced to make incoherent bets and ultimately become a money pump), I wrote: I have never found this argument appealing, because a bet is a game not a decision. A bet requires 2 players, and one player has to offer the bets. I do agree that in some bounded settings (for example, betting on win place show in a horse race), I’d want my bets to be coherent; if they are incoherent (e.g., if my bets correspond to P(A|B)*P(B) not being equal to P(A,B)), then I should be able to do better by examining the incoherence. But in an “open system” (to borrow some physics jargon), I don’t think coherence is possible. There is always new information coming in, and there is always additional prior information in reserve that hasn’t entered the model.
4 0.74531674 2229 andrew gelman stats-2014-02-28-God-leaf-tree
Introduction: Govind Manian writes: I wanted to pass along a fragment from Lichtenberg’s Waste Books — which I am finding to be great stone soup — that reminded me of God is in Every Leaf : To the wise man nothing is great and nothing small…I believe he could write treatises on keyholes that sounded as weighty as a jus naturae and would be just as instructive. As the few adepts in such things well know, universal morality is to be found in little everyday penny-events just as much as in great ones. There is so much goodness and ingenuity in a raindrop that an apothecary wouldn’t let it go for less than half-a-crown… (Notebook B, 33)
5 0.7413094 1356 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-31-Question 21 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
Introduction: 21. A country is divided into three regions with populations of 2 million, 2 million, and 0.5 million, respectively. A survey is done asking about foreign policy opinions.. Somebody proposes taking a sample of 50 people from each reason. Give a reason why this non-proportional sample would not usually be done, and also a reason why it might actually be a good idea. Solution to question 20 From yesterday : 20. Explain in two sentences why we expect survey respondents to be honest about vote preferences but possibly dishonest about reporting unhealty behaviors. Solution: Respondents tend to be sincere about vote preferences because this affects the outcome of the poll, and people are motivated to have their candidate poll well. This motivation is typically not present in reporting behaviors; you have no particular reason for wanting to affect the average survey response.
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