andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2302 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: E. J. Wagenmakers writes: Remember I briefly talked to you about the subjective assessment of evidence? Together with Richard Morey and myself, Annelies Bartlema created a short questionnaire that can be done online. There are five scenarios and it does not take more than 5 minutes to complete. So far we have collected responses from psychology faculty and psychology students, but we were also keen to get responses from a more statistically savvy crowd: the people who read your blog! Try it out!
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3 There are five scenarios and it does not take more than 5 minutes to complete. [sent-5, score-0.613]
4 So far we have collected responses from psychology faculty and psychology students, but we were also keen to get responses from a more statistically savvy crowd: the people who read your blog! [sent-6, score-2.368]
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same-blog 1 1.0 2302 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-23-A short questionnaire regarding the subjective assessment of evidence
Introduction: E. J. Wagenmakers writes: Remember I briefly talked to you about the subjective assessment of evidence? Together with Richard Morey and myself, Annelies Bartlema created a short questionnaire that can be done online. There are five scenarios and it does not take more than 5 minutes to complete. So far we have collected responses from psychology faculty and psychology students, but we were also keen to get responses from a more statistically savvy crowd: the people who read your blog! Try it out!
2 0.11433523 1681 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-19-Participate in a short survey about the weight of evidence provided by statistics
Introduction: Richard Morey writes: Rink Hoekstra and I are undertaking some research to explore how people use classical statistical results to evaluate the weight of evidence. Bayesians often critique classical techniques for being difficult to interpret in terms of what scientists want to know, but there is clearly information in the statistics themselves. We wonder how people extract that information. Below is our official announcement; it would be great if you could let people on your blog know about the survey, as we want to get a wide variety of statistical users to take the survey. Announcement follows: Empirical science is grounded on the belief that data can be used as evidence. The convincingness of data — the “weight” of the evidence they provide — is crucial to deciding between rival scientific positions. In situations with no uncertainty, reasoning about evidence is often straightforward; in practice, however, most conclusions from data involve uncertainty. In these situations,
Introduction: Chris Masse points me to this response by Daryl Bem and two statisticians (Jessica Utts and Wesley Johnson) to criticisms by Wagenmakers et.al. of Bem’s recent ESP study. I have nothing to add but would like to repeat a couple bits of my discussions of last month, of here : Classical statistical methods that work reasonably well when studying moderate or large effects (see the work of Fisher, Snedecor, Cochran, etc.) fall apart in the presence of small effects. I think it’s naive when people implicitly assume that the study’s claims are correct, or the study’s statistical methods are weak. Generally, the smaller the effects you’re studying, the better the statistics you need. ESP is a field of small effects and so ESP researchers use high-quality statistics. To put it another way: whatever methodological errors happen to be in the paper in question, probably occur in lots of researcher papers in “legitimate” psychology research. The difference is that when you’re studying a
4 0.10370518 2362 andrew gelman stats-2014-06-06-Statistically savvy journalism
Introduction: Roy Mendelssohn points me to this excellent bit of statistics reporting by Matt Novak. I have no comment, I just think it’s good to see this sort of high-quality Felix Salmon-style statistically savvy journalism.
5 0.10186656 1362 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-03-Question 24 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
Introduction: 24. A supermarket chain has 100 equally-sized stores. It is desired to estimate the proportion of vegetables that spoil before being sold. The following sampling designs are considered: (a) Sample 10 stores, then sample half the vegetables within each of these stores; or (b) Sample 20 stores, then sample one-quarter of the vegetables within each of these stores. Which of these designs has the lowest variance? Why might the higher-variance design still be chosen? Solution to question 23 From yesterday : 23. Suppose you are conducting a survey in which people are asked about their health behaviors (how often they wash their hands, how often they go to the doctor, etc.). There is a concern that different interviewers will get different sorts of responses—that is, there may be important interviewer effects. Describe (in two sentences) how you could estimate the interviewer effects within your survey. Can the interviewer effects create problems of reliability of the survey r
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same-blog 1 0.96215552 2302 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-23-A short questionnaire regarding the subjective assessment of evidence
Introduction: E. J. Wagenmakers writes: Remember I briefly talked to you about the subjective assessment of evidence? Together with Richard Morey and myself, Annelies Bartlema created a short questionnaire that can be done online. There are five scenarios and it does not take more than 5 minutes to complete. So far we have collected responses from psychology faculty and psychology students, but we were also keen to get responses from a more statistically savvy crowd: the people who read your blog! Try it out!
2 0.65275615 1507 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-22-Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??
Introduction: My upstairs colleague Blattman writes : The trend is unsurprising. Schools have every incentive to move to the highest four or five piles [grades] possible. . . . Then grade inflation will stop because . . there will be nowhere to go. . . . So why resist the new equilibrium? I don’t have any argument for resisting, but I don’t think everything’s quite so simple as Chris is saying. First, you can easily get compression so that almost everyone gets the same grade (“A”). So, no four or five piles. Second, the incentives for grading high have been there for awhile. To me, the more interesting question is: how is it that grade inflation hasn’t gone faster? Why would it take so many decades to reach a natural and obvious equilibrium? Here’s what I wrote last year : As a teacher who, like many others, assigns grades in an unregulated environment (that is, we have no standardized tests and no rules on how we should grade), all the incentives to toward giving only A’s: Wh
3 0.64463276 825 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-27-Grade inflation: why weren’t the instructors all giving all A’s already??
Introduction: There’s been some discussion lately about grade inflation. Here’s a graph from Stuart Rojstaczer ( link from Nathan Yau): Rojstaczer writes: In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was about 2.35, a number that corresponds with data compiled by W. Perry in 1943. By the 1950s, the average GPA was about 2.52. GPAs took off in the 1960s with grades at private schools rising faster than public schools, lulled in the 1970s, and began to rise again in the 1980s at a rate of about 0.10 to 0.15 increase in GPA per decade. The grade inflation that began in the 1980s has yet to end. . . . These trends may help explain why private school students are disproportionately represented in Ph.D. study in science and engineering and why they tend to dominate admission into the most prestigious professional schools. People have discussed why the grades have been going up and whether this is a bad thing. I have a slightly different take on all this. As a t
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Introduction: In response to some big new push for testing schoolchildren, Mark Palko writes : The announcement of a new curriculum is invariably followed by a round of hearty round of self congratulations and talk of “keeping standards high” as if adding a slide to a PowerPoint automatically made students better informed. It doesn’t work that way. Adding a topic to the list simply means that students will be exposed to it, not that they will understand or master or retain it. Well put. In my own teaching, I often am tempted to believe that just putting a topic in a homework problem is enough to ensure that students will learn it. But it doesn’t work that way. Even if they manage to somehow struggle through and solve the problem (and many don’t, or they rely on their friends’ solutions), they won’t learn much if they don’t see the connection with everything else they know. I’m reminded of the time, several years ago, that I learned that photocopying an article and filing it was not the
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Introduction: Back when I taught at Berkeley, I once asked a Ph.D. student how he’d decided to work with me. He said that a couple of the tenured professors had advised him not to take my class, and that this advice had got him curious: What about Bayesian statistics is so dangerous that it can scare these otherwise unflappable stat professors. Overall, my senior colleagues’ advice to students to avoid my course probably decreased my enrollment, but the students who did decide to attend surely had better character than the ones who followed directions. (Or, at least I’d like to think that.) I was reminded of that incident recently when reading a news article by Marc Tracy: A U.S. Department of Education committee is investigating whether a Columbia University department head “steered” a Jewish student away from taking a class on the Mideast taught by Professor Joseph Massad due to the perception that she would be “uncomfortable” because of the professor’s pro-Palestinian tilt . . . “Ba
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same-blog 1 0.92710936 2302 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-23-A short questionnaire regarding the subjective assessment of evidence
Introduction: E. J. Wagenmakers writes: Remember I briefly talked to you about the subjective assessment of evidence? Together with Richard Morey and myself, Annelies Bartlema created a short questionnaire that can be done online. There are five scenarios and it does not take more than 5 minutes to complete. So far we have collected responses from psychology faculty and psychology students, but we were also keen to get responses from a more statistically savvy crowd: the people who read your blog! Try it out!
2 0.86403441 1352 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-29-Question 19 of my final exam for Design and Analysis of Sample Surveys
Introduction: 19. A survey is taken of students in a metropolitan area. At the first stage a school is sampled at random. The schools are divided into two strata: 20 private schools and 50 public schools are sampled. At the second stage, 5 classes are sampled within each sampled school. At the third stage, 10 students are sampled within each class. What is the probability that any given student is sampled? Express this in terms of the number of students in the class, number of classes in the school, and number of schools in the area. Define appropriate notation as needed. Solution to question 18 From yesterday : 18. A survey is taken of 100 undergraduates, 100 graduate students, and 100 continuing education students at a university. Assume a simple random sample within each group. Each student is asked to rate his or her satisfaction (on a 1–10 scale) with his or her experiences. Write the estimate and standard error of the average satisfaction of all the students at the university. Introd
3 0.86158162 932 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-30-Articles on the philosophy of Bayesian statistics by Cox, Mayo, Senn, and others!
Introduction: Deborah Mayo, Aris Spanos, and Kent Staley edited a special issue on the philosophy of Bayesian statistics for the journal Rationality, Markets and Morals. Here are the contents : David Cox and Deborah G. Mayo, “Statistical Scientist Meets a Philosopher of Science: A Conversation” Deborah G. Mayo, “Statistical Science and Philosophy of Science: Where Do/Should They Meet in 2011 (and Beyond)?” Stephen Senn, “You May Believe You Are a Bayesian But You Are Probably Wrong” Andrew Gelman, “ Induction and Deduction in Bayesian Data Analysis “ Jan Sprenger, “The Renegade Subjectivist: Jose Bernardo’s Objective Bayesianism” Aris Spanos. “Foundational Issues in Statistical Modeling: Statistical Model Specification and Validation” David F. Hendry, “Empirical Economic Model Discovery and Theory Evaluation” Larry Wasserman, “Low Assumptions, High Dimensions” For some reason, not all the articles are yet online, but it says they’re coming soon. In the meantime, you ca
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Introduction: Many years ago, a research psychologist whose judgment I greatly respect told me that the characterization of personality by the so-called Big Five traits (extraversion, etc.) was old-fashioned. So I’m always surprised to see that the Big Five keeps cropping up. I guess not everyone agrees that it’s a bad idea. For example, Hamdan Azhar wrote to me: I was wondering if you’d seen this recent paper (De Young et al. 2010) that finds significant correlations between brain volume in selected regions and personality trait measures (from the Big Five). This is quite a ground-breaking finding and it was covered extensively in the mainstream media. I think readers of your blog would be interested in your thoughts, statistically speaking, on their methodology and findings. My reply: I’d be interested in my thoughts on this too! But I don’t know enough to say anything useful. From the abstract of the paper under discussion: Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume
5 0.84781027 235 andrew gelman stats-2010-08-25-Term Limits for the Supreme Court?
Introduction: In the wake of the confirmation of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, political commentators have been expressing a bit of frustration about polarization within the court and polarization in the nomination process. One proposal that’s been floating around is to replace lifetime appointments by fixed terms, perhaps twelve or eighteen years. This would enforce a regular schedule of replacements, instead of the current system in which eighty-something judges have an incentive to hang on as long as possible so as to time their retirements to be during the administration of a politically-compatible president. A couple weeks ago at the sister blog, John Sides discussed some recent research that was relevant to the judicial term limits proposal. Political scientists Justin Crowe and Chris Karpowitz analyzed the historical record or Supreme Court terms and found that long terms of twenty years or more have been happening since the early years of the court. Yes, there is less turnover th
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