andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2233 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Thomas Basbøll pointed me to a discussion on the orgtheory blog in which Jerry Davis, the editor of a journal of business management argued that it is difficult for academic researchers to communicate with the public because “the public prefers Cheetos to a healthy salad” and when serious papers are discussed on the internet, “everyone is a methodologist.” The discussion heated up when an actual methodologist, Steve Morgan, joined in to argue that the salad in question was not so healthy and that the much-derided internet commenters made some valuable points. The final twist was that one of the orgtheory bloggers deleted a comment and then closed the thread entirely when the discussion got too conflictual. In a few days I’ll return to the meta-topic of the discussion, but right now I want to focus on one thing Davis wrote, a particular statement that illustrates to me the gap between the rhetorical and the literal, the way in which a statement can sound good but make no sense. He
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 ” The discussion heated up when an actual methodologist, Steve Morgan, joined in to argue that the salad in question was not so healthy and that the much-derided internet commenters made some valuable points. [sent-2, score-0.551]
2 As is traditional at ASQ, the authors faced smart and skeptical reviewers who put them through the wringer, and a harsh and generally negative editor (me). [sent-14, score-0.519]
3 If Davis was generally negative about the paper, why did he publish it at all? [sent-20, score-0.255]
4 ” And, more to the point, what does it mean to be “harsh and generally negative” about a paper that is “really nice,” “extremely sophisticated,” and “really good”? [sent-22, score-0.264]
5 A paper was published in his journal and got positive publicity in the newspaper. [sent-25, score-0.562]
6 This made him happy (as indeed it should; he works hard as a journal editor and it’s good to feel that your work is making an impact), but then he was unhappy to see many of the newspaper’s internet commenters criticizing the study, and he vented his annoyance on the orgtheory blog. [sent-26, score-0.751]
7 For rhetorical reasons, he amped up the praise of this solid but unexciting article and described his own editing role as “harsh and generally negative” to heighten the contrast. [sent-28, score-0.297]
8 ” Again, I’m not saying that this paper was terrible, just pointing out the gap between incoherence of the praise that the journal editor is giving to it. [sent-34, score-0.512]
9 It’s hard to get a paper published in a top journal—and, from an editor’s point of view, it’s hard to get media publicity—so, in either case, when you’ve achieved that goal, it’s natural to want to take a rest. [sent-36, score-0.457]
10 The main reason that I love getting a paper published is that then I can close the process and move on to other new and exciting projects. [sent-47, score-0.284]
11 ” The fact that in such public debates of my previously published papers I’d need to go back to old stuff, essentially takes away the biggest satisfaction I derive from publishing a paper. [sent-49, score-0.4]
12 I mean, sure, I too get satisfaction out of having a project done, seeing the paper in reader’s hands, seeing the book on the shelf, grading the last final exam and saying goodbye to the semester—but “the biggest satisfaction”? [sent-52, score-0.482]
13 If your biggest satisfaction in a project is that it’s done and you get to “move on,” maybe you shouldn’t have done that project in the first place! [sent-55, score-0.369]
14 For me, the biggest satisfaction of hiking in the mountains is that delicious moment when I get to take off the backpack and rest. [sent-56, score-0.233]
15 ” I assume that the prize motivates people who otherwise would not have read and commented on the book to read and comment on it, and that these marginal readers and commenters are less enthusiastic about the book, compared to people who would read and comment on it even in the absence of a prize. [sent-63, score-0.351]
16 Or, as one of the much-derided anonymous internet commenters writes : It doesn’t surprise me. [sent-64, score-0.351]
17 You get it a lot on amazon where if a book has won an award or becomes famous it attracts a lot of negative reviews because people buy it because of the hype when it’s probably not their sort of book. [sent-65, score-0.475]
18 Meanwhile less famous books by the same author get higher average reviews because they tend to be read only by people who are into that writer and maybe more on their wavelength. [sent-66, score-0.267]
19 I’m a big fan of Roberto Bolaño for example and his two most famous books 2666 and Savage Detectives have some pretty negative reviews by people who bought them on the back of the hype and hated them because he’s simply not a writer for everyone. [sent-67, score-0.435]
20 ” Davis’s preferred paper is related to business management and the texting paper is related to public health, so I can see why he, as a business-school professor, would consider the former topic more important and worthy of serious coverage. [sent-76, score-0.557]
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same-blog 1 0.9999997 2233 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-04-Literal vs. rhetorical
Introduction: Thomas Basbøll pointed me to a discussion on the orgtheory blog in which Jerry Davis, the editor of a journal of business management argued that it is difficult for academic researchers to communicate with the public because “the public prefers Cheetos to a healthy salad” and when serious papers are discussed on the internet, “everyone is a methodologist.” The discussion heated up when an actual methodologist, Steve Morgan, joined in to argue that the salad in question was not so healthy and that the much-derided internet commenters made some valuable points. The final twist was that one of the orgtheory bloggers deleted a comment and then closed the thread entirely when the discussion got too conflictual. In a few days I’ll return to the meta-topic of the discussion, but right now I want to focus on one thing Davis wrote, a particular statement that illustrates to me the gap between the rhetorical and the literal, the way in which a statement can sound good but make no sense. He
Introduction: I post (approximately) once a day and don’t plan to change that. I have enough material to post more often—for example, I could intersperse existing blog posts with summaries of my published papers or of other work that I like; and, beyond this, we currently have a one-to-two-month backlog of posts—but I’m afraid that if the number of posts were doubled, the attention given to each would be roughly halved. Looking at it the other way, I certainly don’t want to reduce my level of posting. Sure, it takes time to blog, but these are things that are important for me to say. If I were to blog less frequently, it would only be because I was pouring all these words into a different vessel, for example a book. For now, though, I think it makes sense to blog and then collect the words later as appropriate. With blogging I get comments, and many of these comments are helpful—either directly (by pointing out errors in my thinking or linking to relevant software or literature) or indirec
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Introduction: In our recent discussion of modes of publication, Joseph Wilson wrote, “The single best reform science can make right now is to decouple publication from career advancement, thereby reducing the number of publications by an order of magnitude and then move to an entirely disjointed, informal, online free-for-all communication system for research results.” My first thought on this was: Sure, yeah, that makes sense. But then I got to thinking: what would it really mean to decouple publication from career advancement? This is too late for me—I’m middle-aged and have no career advancement in my future—but it got me thinking more carefully about the role of publication in the research process, and this seemed worth a blog (the simplest sort of publication available to me). However, somewhere between writing the above paragraphs and writing the blog entry, I forgot exactly what I was going to say! I guess I should’ve just typed it all in then. In the old days I just wouldn’t run this
Introduction: The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), and I was thinking a bit more about why I was so bothered that it was published in Psychological Science, which I’d thought of as a serious research journal. My concern isn’t just that that the paper is bad—after all, lots of bad papers get published—but rather that it had nothing really going for it, except that it was headline bait. It was a survey done on Mechanical Turk, that’s it. No clever design, no clever questions, no care in dealing with nonresponse problems, no innovative data analysis, no nothing. The paper had nothing to offer, except that it had no obvious flaws. Psychology is a huge field full of brilliant researchers.
5 0.18909101 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
Introduction: I’m postponing today’s scheduled post (“Empirical implications of Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models”) to continue the lively discussion from yesterday, What if I were to stop publishing in journals? . An example: my papers with Basbøll Thomas Basbøll and I got into a long discussion on our blogs about business school professor Karl Weick and other cases of plagiarism copying text without attribution. We felt it useful to take our ideas to the next level and write them up as a manuscript, which ended up being logical to split into two papers. At that point I put some effort into getting these papers published, which I eventually did: To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime went into American Scientist and When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences will appear in Sociological Methods and Research. The second paper, in particular, took some effort to place; I got some advice from colleagues in sociology as to where
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Introduction: Thomas Basbøll pointed me to a discussion on the orgtheory blog in which Jerry Davis, the editor of a journal of business management argued that it is difficult for academic researchers to communicate with the public because “the public prefers Cheetos to a healthy salad” and when serious papers are discussed on the internet, “everyone is a methodologist.” The discussion heated up when an actual methodologist, Steve Morgan, joined in to argue that the salad in question was not so healthy and that the much-derided internet commenters made some valuable points. The final twist was that one of the orgtheory bloggers deleted a comment and then closed the thread entirely when the discussion got too conflictual. In a few days I’ll return to the meta-topic of the discussion, but right now I want to focus on one thing Davis wrote, a particular statement that illustrates to me the gap between the rhetorical and the literal, the way in which a statement can sound good but make no sense. He
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Introduction: John Mashey points me to a blog post by Phil Davis on “the emergence of a citation cartel.” Davis tells the story: Cell Transplantation is a medical journal published by the Cognizant Communication Corporation of Putnam Valley, New York. In recent years, its impact factor has been growing rapidly. In 2006, it was 3.482 [I think he means "3.5"---ed.]. In 2010, it had almost doubled to 6.204. When you look at which journals cite Cell Transplantation, two journals stand out noticeably: the Medical Science Monitor, and The Scientific World Journal. According to the JCR, neither of these journals cited Cell Transplantation until 2010. Then, in 2010, a review article was published in the Medical Science Monitor citing 490 articles, 445 of which were to papers published in Cell Transplantation. All 445 citations pointed to papers published in 2008 or 2009 — the citation window from which the journal’s 2010 impact factor was derived. Of the remaining 45 citations, 44 cited the Me
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Introduction: I discussed two problems: 1. An artificial scarcity applied to journal publication, a scarcity which I believe is being enforced based on a monetary principle of not wanting to reduce the value of publication. The problem is that journals don’t just spread information and improve communication, they also represent chits for hiring and promotion. I’d prefer to separate these two aspects of publication. To keep these functions tied together seems to me like a terrible mistake. It would be as if, instead of using dollar bills as currency, we were to just use paper , and then if the government kept paper artificially scarce to retain the value of money, so that we were reduced to scratching notes to each other on walls and tables. 2. The discontinuous way in which unpublished papers and submissions to journals are taken as highly suspect and requiring a strong justification of all methods and assumptions, but once a paper becomes published its conclusions are taken as true unless
4 0.91218144 834 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-01-I owe it all to the haters
Introduction: Sometimes when I submit an article to a journal it is accepted right away or with minor alterations. But many of my favorite articles were rejected or had to go through an exhausting series of revisions. For example, this influential article had a very hostile referee and we had to seriously push the journal editor to accept it. This one was rejected by one or two journals before finally appearing with discussion. This paper was rejected by the American Political Science Review with no chance of revision and we had to publish it in the British Journal of Political Science, which was a bit odd given that the article was 100% about American politics. And when I submitted this instant classic (actually at the invitation of the editor), the referees found it to be trivial, and the editor did me the favor of publishing it but only by officially labeling it as a discussion of another article that appeared in the same issue. Some of my most influential papers were accepted right
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Introduction: In our recent discussion of modes of publication, Joseph Wilson wrote, “The single best reform science can make right now is to decouple publication from career advancement, thereby reducing the number of publications by an order of magnitude and then move to an entirely disjointed, informal, online free-for-all communication system for research results.” My first thought on this was: Sure, yeah, that makes sense. But then I got to thinking: what would it really mean to decouple publication from career advancement? This is too late for me—I’m middle-aged and have no career advancement in my future—but it got me thinking more carefully about the role of publication in the research process, and this seemed worth a blog (the simplest sort of publication available to me). However, somewhere between writing the above paragraphs and writing the blog entry, I forgot exactly what I was going to say! I guess I should’ve just typed it all in then. In the old days I just wouldn’t run this
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Introduction: Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel’s former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . . . However, the Committees were of the opinion that the main bulk of the work had not yet even started. . . . Journal publications can often leave traces that reach far into and even beyond scientific disciplines. The self-cleansing character of science calls for fraudulent publications to be withdrawn and no longer to proliferate within the literature. In addition, based on their initial impressions, the Committees believed that there were other serious issues within Mr Stapel’s publications . . . This brought into the spotlight a research culture in which this sloppy science, alongside out-and-out fraud, was able to remain undetected
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Introduction: Thomas Basbøll pointed me to a discussion on the orgtheory blog in which Jerry Davis, the editor of a journal of business management argued that it is difficult for academic researchers to communicate with the public because “the public prefers Cheetos to a healthy salad” and when serious papers are discussed on the internet, “everyone is a methodologist.” The discussion heated up when an actual methodologist, Steve Morgan, joined in to argue that the salad in question was not so healthy and that the much-derided internet commenters made some valuable points. The final twist was that one of the orgtheory bloggers deleted a comment and then closed the thread entirely when the discussion got too conflictual. In a few days I’ll return to the meta-topic of the discussion, but right now I want to focus on one thing Davis wrote, a particular statement that illustrates to me the gap between the rhetorical and the literal, the way in which a statement can sound good but make no sense. He
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Introduction: Some clarification on the Bayes-in-China issue raised last week : 1. We heard that the Chinese publisher cited the following pages that might contain politically objectionable materials: 3, 5, 21, 73, 112, 201. 2. It appears that, as some commenters suggested, the objection was to some of the applications, not to the Bayesian methods. 3. Our book is not censored in China. In fact, as some commenters mentioned, it is possible to buy it there, and it is also available in university libraries there. The edition of the book which was canceled was intended to be a low-cost reprint of the book. The original book is still available. I used the phrase “Banned in China” as a joke and I apologize if it was misinterpreted. 4. I have no quarrel with the Chinese government or with any Chinese publishers. They can publish whatever books they would like. I found this episode amusing only because I do not think my book on regression and multilevel models has any strong political co
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Introduction: Someone who wishes to remain anonymous writes: I’ve been following your blog a long time and enjoy your posts on visualization/statistical graphics matters. I don’t recall however you ever describing the details of your setup for plotting. I’m a new R user (convert from matplotlib) and would love to know your thoughts on the ideal setup: do you use mainly the R base? Do you use lattice? What do you think of ggplot2? etc. I found ggplot2 nearly indecipherable until a recent eureka moment, and I think its default theme is a waste tremendous ink (all those silly grey backgrounds and grids are really unnecessary), but if you customize that away it can be made to look like ordinary, pretty statistical graphs. Feel free to respond on your blog, but if you do, please remove my name from the post (my colleagues already make fun of me for thinking about visualization too much.) I love that last bit! Anyway, my response is that I do everything in base graphics (using my
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