andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2313 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: I met Seth back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. He sometimes came to the statistics department seminar and we got to talking about various things; in particular we shared an interest in statistical graphics. Much of my work in this direction eventually went toward the use of graphical displays to understand fitted models. Seth went in another direction and got interested in the role of exploratory data analysis in science, the idea that we could use graphs not just to test or even understand a model but also as the source of new hypotheses. We continued to discuss these issues over the years; see here , for example. At some point when we were at Berkeley the administration was encouraging the faculty to teach freshman seminars, and I had the idea of teaching a course on left-handedness. I’d just read the book by Stanley Coren and thought it would be fun to go through it with a class, chapter by chapter. But my knowledge of psych
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 But my knowledge of psychology was minimal so I contacted the one person I knew in the psychology department and asked him if he had any suggestions of someone who’d like to teach the course with me. [sent-8, score-0.226]
2 One of his ideas was to look at large faces in the morning (he used tapes of late-night comedy monologues). [sent-11, score-0.144]
3 He told me once that his shift was motivated by teaching introductory undergraduate psychology: the students, he said, were interested in things that would affect their lives, and, compared to that, the kind of research that leads to a productive academic career did not seem so appealing. [sent-22, score-0.22]
4 I suppose that Seth could’ve tried to do research in clinical psychology (Berkeley’s department actually has a strong clinical program) but instead he moved in a different direction and tried different things to improve his sleep and then, later, his skin, his mood, and his diet. [sent-23, score-0.322]
5 In this work, Seth applied what he later called his “insider/outsider perspective”: he was an insider in that he applied what he’d learned from years of research on animal behavior, an outsider in that he was not working within the existing paradigm of research in physiology and nutrition. [sent-24, score-0.179]
6 At the same time he was working on a book project, which I believe started as a new introductory psychology course focused on science and self-improvement but ultimately morphed into a trade book on ways in which our adaptations to Stone Age life were not serving us well in the modern era. [sent-25, score-0.214]
7 When Seth came up with the connection between morning faces and depression, this seemed potentially hugely important. [sent-28, score-0.144]
8 Seth’s next success was losing 40 pounds on his unusual diet, in which you can eat whatever you want as long as each day you drink a cup of unflavored sugar water, at least an hour before or after a meal. [sent-34, score-0.335]
9 To be more precise, it’s not that you can eat whatever you want—obviously, if you live a sedentary lifestyle and you eat a bunch of big macs and an extra-large coke each day, you’ll get fat. [sent-35, score-0.14]
10 I asked Seth once if he thought I’d lose weight if I were to try his diet in a passive way, drinking the sugar water at the recommended time but not actively trying to reduce my caloric intake. [sent-37, score-0.426]
11 He said he supposed not, that the diet would make it easier to lose weight but you’d probably still have to consciously eat less. [sent-38, score-0.317]
12 Some of his findings from the ten of his experiments discussed in the article: Seeing faces in the morning on television decreased mood in the evening and improved mood the next day . [sent-49, score-0.315]
13 Standing 8 hours per day reduced early awakening and made sleep more restorative . [sent-52, score-0.212]
14 Drinking unflavored fructose water caused a large weight loss that has lasted more than 1 year . [sent-55, score-0.194]
15 Seth’s work was featured in a series of increasingly prominent blogs, which led to a newspaper article by the authors of Freakonomics and ultimately a successful diet book (not enough to make Seth rich, I think, but Seth had simple tastes and no desire to be rich, as far as I know). [sent-62, score-0.172]
16 Meanwhile, Seth started a blog of his own which led to a message board for his diet that he told me had thousands of participants. [sent-63, score-0.18]
17 On his blog and elsewhere Seth reported success with various self-experiments, most recently a claim of improved brain function after eating half a stick of butter a day. [sent-64, score-0.186]
18 It took Seth close to 10 years of sustained experimentation to fix his sleep problems, but in recent years it seemed that all sorts of different things he tried were effective. [sent-66, score-0.265]
19 One problem is that sleep hours and weight can be measured fairly objectively, whereas if you measure brain function by giving yourself little quizzes, it doesn’t seem hard at all for a bit of unconscious bias to drive all your results. [sent-69, score-0.244]
20 Seth was a complete outsider in the psychology department at Berkeley for decades and eventually took early retirement while barely in his fifties. [sent-76, score-0.226]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('seth', 0.817), ('diet', 0.138), ('josh', 0.117), ('sleep', 0.088), ('faces', 0.078), ('weight', 0.071), ('water', 0.071), ('psychology', 0.07), ('eat', 0.07), ('sugar', 0.066), ('morning', 0.066), ('berkeley', 0.064), ('mood', 0.06), ('eating', 0.056), ('unflavored', 0.052), ('academic', 0.052), ('day', 0.051), ('years', 0.051), ('department', 0.049), ('success', 0.049), ('rajeev', 0.049), ('spy', 0.047), ('unusual', 0.047), ('research', 0.046), ('brain', 0.046), ('teaching', 0.045), ('time', 0.042), ('told', 0.042), ('lives', 0.04), ('sustained', 0.04), ('hours', 0.039), ('drinking', 0.038), ('easier', 0.038), ('ny', 0.038), ('retirement', 0.037), ('university', 0.037), ('continued', 0.037), ('someone', 0.037), ('depression', 0.036), ('outsider', 0.036), ('lived', 0.036), ('interest', 0.036), ('columbia', 0.035), ('things', 0.035), ('half', 0.035), ('controlled', 0.035), ('trade', 0.034), ('book', 0.034), ('direction', 0.034), ('early', 0.034)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.99999934 2313 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-30-Seth Roberts
Introduction: I met Seth back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. He sometimes came to the statistics department seminar and we got to talking about various things; in particular we shared an interest in statistical graphics. Much of my work in this direction eventually went toward the use of graphical displays to understand fitted models. Seth went in another direction and got interested in the role of exploratory data analysis in science, the idea that we could use graphs not just to test or even understand a model but also as the source of new hypotheses. We continued to discuss these issues over the years; see here , for example. At some point when we were at Berkeley the administration was encouraging the faculty to teach freshman seminars, and I had the idea of teaching a course on left-handedness. I’d just read the book by Stanley Coren and thought it would be fun to go through it with a class, chapter by chapter. But my knowledge of psych
Introduction: My friend Seth, whom I know from Berkeley (we taught a course together on left-handedness), has a blog on topics ranging from thoughtful discussions of scientific evidence, to experiences with his unconventional weight-loss scheme, offbeat self-experimentation, and advocacy of fringe scientific theories, leavened with occasional dollops of cynicism and political extremism . I agree with Seth on some things but not others. ( Here’s Seth’s reason for not attempting a clinical trial of his diet.) Recently I was disturbed (but, I’m sorry to say, not surprised) to see Seth post the following: Predictions of climate models versus reality . I [Seth] have only seen careful prediction-vs-reality comparisons made by AGW [anthropogenic global warming] skeptics. Those who believe humans are dangerously warming the planet appear to be silent on this subject. In response, Phil commented : Funny, on the day you [Seth] made your post saying that you haven’t seen comparis
3 0.43376881 446 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-03-Is 0.05 too strict as a p-value threshold?
Introduction: Seth sent along an article (not by him) from the psychology literature and wrote: This is a good example of your complaint about statistical significance. The authors want to say that predictability of information determines how distracting something is and have two conditions that vary in predictability. One is significantly distracting, the other isn’t. But the two conditions are not significantly different from each other. So the two conditions are different more weakly than p = 0.05. I don’t think the reviewers failed to notice this. They just thought it should be published anyway, is my guess. To me, the interesting question is: where should the bar be? at p = 0.05? at p = 0.10? something else? How can we figure out where to put the bar? I replied: My quick answer is that we have to get away from .05 and .10 and move to something that takes into account prior information. This could be Bayesian (of course) or could be done classically using power calculations, as disc
4 0.36158988 88 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-15-What people do vs. what they want to do
Introduction: Seth, a retired university professor who, during his employment at an elite school, spent a lot of time doing research with the goal of improving people’s lives, writes : Professors, especially at elite schools, dislike doing research with obvious value. It strikes them as menial. “Practical” and “applied” are terms of disparagement, whereas “pure” research (research without obvious value) is good. Given that Seth isn’t that way himself, I assume he’d say that this claim applies to “many” professors or “most” professors but surely not all? What I’ve noticed, though, is more the opposite, that even people who do extremely theoretical work like to feel that it is applied, practical, and useful. I think that, among other things, Seth is confusing what people want to do with what they actually can do . For example, he criticizes biologists for researching stem cells and prions rather than prevention of disease. But preventing diseases is difficult! That’s why the scientists
5 0.25773898 111 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-26-Tough love as a style of writing
Introduction: Helen DeWitt links to an interview with Seth Godin, who makes some commonplace but useful observations on jobs and careers. It’s fine, but whenever I read this sort of thing, I get annoyed by the super-aggressive writing style. These internet guys–Seth Godin, Clay Shirky, Philip Greenspun, Jeff Jarvis, and so on–are always getting in your face, telling you how everything you thought was true was wrong. Some of the things these guys say are just silly (for example, Godin’s implication that Bob Dylan is more of a success than the Monkees because Dylan sells more tickets), other times they have interesting insights, but reading any of them for awhile just sets me on edge. I can’t take being shouted at, and I get a little tired of hearing over and over again that various people, industries, etc., are dinosaurs. Where does this aggressive style come from? My guess is that it’s coming from the vast supply of “business books” out there. These are books that are supposed to grab yo
6 0.21380791 787 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-05-Different goals, different looks: Infovis and the Chris Rock effect
7 0.18928567 1517 andrew gelman stats-2012-10-01-“On Inspiring Students and Being Human”
8 0.16315268 1233 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-27-Pushback against internet self-help gurus
10 0.12135904 150 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Gaydar update: Additional research on estimating small fractions of the population
11 0.11521086 1061 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-16-CrossValidated: A place to post your statistics questions
12 0.11224411 1832 andrew gelman stats-2013-04-29-The blogroll
13 0.10558677 2245 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-12-More on publishing in journals
14 0.10239981 1905 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-18-There are no fat sprinters
15 0.093138292 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
16 0.091530688 390 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-02-Fragment of statistical autobiography
17 0.088202976 1239 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-01-A randomized trial of the set-point diet
18 0.085630618 868 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-24-Blogs vs. real journalism
19 0.085044965 1303 andrew gelman stats-2012-05-06-I’m skeptical about this skeptical article about left-handedness
20 0.084618345 970 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-24-Bell Labs
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.212), (1, -0.095), (2, -0.056), (3, -0.014), (4, 0.014), (5, 0.018), (6, 0.043), (7, 0.042), (8, 0.002), (9, 0.015), (10, -0.011), (11, -0.008), (12, 0.034), (13, -0.028), (14, 0.018), (15, 0.016), (16, 0.027), (17, -0.026), (18, 0.013), (19, -0.001), (20, -0.029), (21, -0.014), (22, -0.057), (23, 0.025), (24, -0.016), (25, -0.024), (26, -0.025), (27, -0.025), (28, 0.027), (29, 0.06), (30, -0.002), (31, -0.009), (32, -0.033), (33, -0.024), (34, -0.022), (35, -0.021), (36, 0.013), (37, -0.031), (38, -0.015), (39, -0.085), (40, -0.014), (41, -0.006), (42, 0.018), (43, 0.043), (44, 0.006), (45, -0.085), (46, 0.008), (47, 0.006), (48, -0.039), (49, 0.032)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.95589405 2313 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-30-Seth Roberts
Introduction: I met Seth back in the early 1990s when we were both professors at the University of California. He sometimes came to the statistics department seminar and we got to talking about various things; in particular we shared an interest in statistical graphics. Much of my work in this direction eventually went toward the use of graphical displays to understand fitted models. Seth went in another direction and got interested in the role of exploratory data analysis in science, the idea that we could use graphs not just to test or even understand a model but also as the source of new hypotheses. We continued to discuss these issues over the years; see here , for example. At some point when we were at Berkeley the administration was encouraging the faculty to teach freshman seminars, and I had the idea of teaching a course on left-handedness. I’d just read the book by Stanley Coren and thought it would be fun to go through it with a class, chapter by chapter. But my knowledge of psych
2 0.81339055 1670 andrew gelman stats-2013-01-13-More Bell Labs happy talk
Introduction: Mort Panish writes: I just read your review of Gertner’s book. I agree with most of what you say re Bell labs. I worked in the research area from 1964 to 1992 having arrived in what I regarded as a sort of heaven after 10 years in industrial research elsewhere. For much of that time I headed the Materials Science Research Dept. in the Solid State Electronics Laboratory. For a large number of the senior staff the eight hour day was the exception, not the rule, and even on weekends the parking lot was often 1/4 full. Most of the people I worked with were self driven and loved their work and the opportunities the Labs. provided to be maximally scientifically productive. Even during lunch in the cafeteria productive interactions were a common occurrence. I could go on and on, but just wanted to thank you for bring back pleasant memories of a long and productive career at Bell Labs after 20 years in retirement. Also, for thsoe who missed it, my personal reminiscences of Bell Labs
3 0.80916482 1261 andrew gelman stats-2012-04-12-The Naval Research Lab
Introduction: I worked at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory for four summers during high school and college. I spent much of my time writing a computer program to do thermal analysis for an experiment that we put on the space shuttle. The facility I developed with the finite-element method came in handy in my job at Bell Labs the following summers. I was working for C. H. Tsao and Jim Adams in the Laboratory for Cosmic Ray Physics. We were estimating the distribution of isotopes in cosmic rays using a pile of track detectors. To get accurate measurements, you want these plastic disks to be as close as possible to a constant temperature, so we designed an elaborate wrapping of thermal blankets. My program computed the temperature of the detectors during the year that the Long Duration Exposure Facility (including our experiment and a bunch of others) was scheduled to be in orbit. The input is the heat from solar radiation (easy enough to compute given the trajectory). On the computer I tr
4 0.80728328 983 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-31-Skepticism about skepticism of global warming skepticism skepticism
Introduction: A group of University of California professors headed by physicist Richard Muller recently released a report confirming global warming. Then geophysicist Judith Curry, a coauthor on the papers produced by the Muller group, turned around and said that their data actually show that global warming has stopped. (Also see clarification here .) Curry is described in the news article as the second author on the papers, but the authors are listed alphabetically so it’s probably more accurate to describe her as one of the ten authors. Muller’s one, Curry’s another, . . . now I want to know what 7 of the other 8 authors think! (One of the authors is Richard Muller’s daughter Elizabeth, so maybe we shouldn’t count her as an independent view.) Some enterprising reporter should really interview the other 7 authors of that report . Just a quick question like, “Is there scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped?” To add some fuel to the fire, let me repost what my ph
5 0.80381346 970 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-24-Bell Labs
Introduction: Sining Chen told me they’re hiring in the statistics group at Bell Labs . I’ll do my bit for economic stimulus by announcing this job (see below). I love Bell Labs. I worked there for three summers, in a physics lab in 1985-86 under the supervision of Loren Pfeiffer, and by myself in the statistics group in 1990. I learned a lot working for Loren. He was a really smart and driven guy. His lab was a small set of rooms—in Bell Labs, everything’s in a small room, as they value the positive externality of close physical proximity of different labs, which you get by making each lab compact—and it was Loren, his assistant (a guy named Ken West who kept everything running in the lab), and three summer students: me, Gowton Achaibar, and a girl whose name I’ve forgotten. Gowtan and I had a lot of fun chatting in the lab. One day I made a silly comment about Gowton’s accent—he was from Guyana and pronounced “three” as “tree”—and then I apologized and said: Hey, here I am making fun o
6 0.80079257 88 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-15-What people do vs. what they want to do
7 0.79464036 1191 andrew gelman stats-2012-03-01-Hoe noem je?
8 0.78217 2053 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-06-Ideas that spread fast and slow
9 0.7734561 1600 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-01-$241,364.83 – $13,000 = $228,364.83
10 0.76874709 592 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-26-“Do you need ideal conditions to do great work?”
11 0.76775938 1453 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-10-Quotes from me!
13 0.7667619 1153 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-04-More on the economic benefits of universities
14 0.76582682 732 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-26-What Do We Learn from Narrow Randomized Studies?
16 0.75828207 1707 andrew gelman stats-2013-02-05-Glenn Hubbard and I were on opposite sides of a court case and I didn’t even know it!
17 0.75773418 740 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-01-The “cushy life” of a University of Illinois sociology professor
19 0.75685817 1623 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-14-GiveWell charity recommendations
20 0.75348723 2158 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-03-Booze: Been There. Done That.
topicId topicWeight
[(10, 0.016), (15, 0.019), (16, 0.084), (21, 0.018), (24, 0.14), (30, 0.02), (34, 0.013), (42, 0.014), (43, 0.016), (53, 0.112), (54, 0.011), (55, 0.022), (76, 0.018), (82, 0.023), (86, 0.02), (95, 0.023), (96, 0.019), (98, 0.02), (99, 0.297)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.98063159 1905 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-18-There are no fat sprinters
Introduction: This post is by Phil. A little over three years ago I wrote a post about exercise and weight loss in which I described losing a fair amount of weight due to (I believe) an exercise regime, with no effort to change my diet; this contradicted the prediction of studies that had recently been released. The comment thread on that post is quite interesting: a lot of people had had similar experiences — losing weight, or keeping it off, with an exercise program that includes very short periods of exercise at maximal intensity — while other people expressed some skepticism about my claims. Some commenters said that I risked injury; others said it was too early to judge anything because my weight loss might not last. The people who predicted injury were right: running the curve during a 200m sprint a month or two after that post, I strained my Achilles tendon. Nothing really serious, but it did keep me off the track for a couple of months, and rather than go back to sprinting I switched t
2 0.97924799 1047 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-08-I Am Too Absolutely Heteroskedastic for This Probit Model
Introduction: Soren Lorensen wrote: I’m working on a project that uses a binary choice model on panel data. Since I have panel data and am using MLE, I’m concerned about heteroskedasticity making my estimates inconsistent and biased. Are you familiar with any statistical packages with pre-built tests for heteroskedasticity in binary choice ML models? If not, is there value in cutting my data into groups over which I guess the error variance might vary and eyeballing residual plots? Have you other suggestions about how I might resolve this concern? I replied that I wouldn’t worry so much about heteroskedasticity. Breaking up the data into pieces might make sense, but for the purpose of estimating how the coefficients might vary—that is, nonlinearity and interactions. Soren shot back: I’m somewhat puzzled however: homoskedasticity is an identifying assumption in estimating a probit model: if we don’t have it all sorts of bad things can happen to our parameter estimates. Do you suggest n
3 0.97802079 495 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-31-“Threshold earners” and economic inequality
Introduction: Reihan Salam discusses a theory of Tyler Cowen regarding “threshold earners,” a sort of upscale version of a slacker. Here’s Cowen : A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure. Salam continues: This clearly reflects the pattern of wage dispersion among my friends, particularly those who attended elite secondary schools and colleges and universities. I [Salam] know many “threshold earners,” including both high and low earners who could earn much more if they chose to make the necessary sacrifices. But they are satisficers. OK, fine so far. But then the claim is made that “threshold earning” behavior increases income inequality. In Cowen’s words: The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural c
Introduction: I’m sorry I don’t have any new zombie papers in time for Halloween. Instead I’d like to be a little monster by reproducing a mini-rant from this article on experimental reasoning in social science: I will restrict my discussion to social science examples. Social scientists are often tempted to illustrate their ideas with examples from medical research. When it comes to medicine, though, we are, with rare exceptions, at best ignorant laypersons (in my case, not even reaching that level), and it is my impression that by reaching for medical analogies we are implicitly trying to borrow some of the scientific and cultural authority of that field for our own purposes. Evidence-based medicine is the subject of a large literature of its own (see, for example, Lau, Ioannidis, and Schmid, 1998).
5 0.97454178 2022 andrew gelman stats-2013-09-13-You heard it here first: Intense exercise can suppress appetite
Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. The New York Times recently ran an article entitled “How Exercise Can Help Us Eat Less,” which begins with this: “Strenuous exercise seems to dull the urge to eat afterward better than gentler workouts, several new studies show, adding to a growing body of science suggesting that intense exercise may have unique benefits.” The article is based on a couple of recent studies in which moderately overweight volunteers participated in different types of exercise, and had their food intake monitored at a subsequent meal. The article also says “[The volunteers] also displayed significantly lower levels of the hormone ghrelin, which is known to stimulate appetite, and elevated levels of both blood lactate and blood sugar, which have been shown to lessen the drive to eat, after the most vigorous interval session than after the other workouts. And the appetite-suppressing effect of the highly intense intervals lingered into the next day, according to food diarie
same-blog 6 0.97077811 2313 andrew gelman stats-2014-04-30-Seth Roberts
7 0.96886438 1468 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-24-Multilevel modeling and instrumental variables
8 0.96864879 446 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-03-Is 0.05 too strict as a p-value threshold?
9 0.96812022 499 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-03-5 books
10 0.96689963 733 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-27-Another silly graph
11 0.96475649 248 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-01-Ratios where the numerator and denominator both change signs
12 0.96359664 991 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-04-Insecure researchers aren’t sharing their data
13 0.96301013 880 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-30-Annals of spam
14 0.95973229 1856 andrew gelman stats-2013-05-14-GPstuff: Bayesian Modeling with Gaussian Processes
15 0.95816183 46 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-21-Careers, one-hit wonders, and an offer of a free book
16 0.95803654 1902 andrew gelman stats-2013-06-17-Job opening at new “big data” consulting firm!
17 0.95654476 687 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-29-Zero is zero
18 0.95473361 1956 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-25-What should be in a machine learning course?
19 0.95283037 108 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-24-Sometimes the raw numbers are better than a percentage
20 0.95257783 2323 andrew gelman stats-2014-05-07-Cause he thinks he’s so-phisticated