andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2014 andrew_gelman_stats-2014-2337 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Ta-Nehisi Coates recently published a fascinating column on the “culture of poverty,” in particular focusing on the idea that behavior that is rational and adaptive in some settings is not so appropriate in others: The set of practices required for a young man to secure his safety on the streets of his troubled neighborhood are not the same as those required to place him on an honor roll . . . The way to guide him through this transition is not to insult his native language. . . . For black men like us, the feeling of having something to lose, beyond honor and face, is foreign. We grew up in communities—New York, Baltimore, Chicago—where the Code of the Streets was the first code we learned. Respect and reputation are everything there. These values are often denigrated by people who have never been punched in the face. But when you live around violence there is no opting out. A reputation for meeting violence with violence is a shield. That protection increases when you are part
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1 We grew up in communities—New York, Baltimore, Chicago—where the Code of the Streets was the first code we learned. [sent-9, score-0.268]
2 These values are often denigrated by people who have never been punched in the face. [sent-11, score-0.186]
3 But when you live around violence there is no opting out. [sent-12, score-0.267]
4 A reputation for meeting violence with violence is a shield. [sent-13, score-0.434]
5 Chait supported the idea that “children raised in concentrated poverty need to be taught middle class norms. [sent-21, score-0.324]
6 ” In contrast, Coates wrote: No, they need to be taught that all norms are not transferable into all worlds. [sent-22, score-0.249]
7 People who take a strict binary view of culture (“culture of privilege = awesome; culture of poverty = fail”) are afflicted by the provincialism of privilege and thus vastly underestimate the dynamism of the greater world. [sent-28, score-0.69]
8 But when your grandmother lives in one hood and your coworkers live another, you generally need something more than “middle-class values. [sent-33, score-0.24]
9 In other cases, admitting error could ultimately yield long-term benefits but it does have short-term costs. [sent-45, score-0.226]
10 In still other cases, we can assume that the people who made the mistakes still haven’t realized their errors (Daryl Bem etc). [sent-48, score-0.191]
11 Finally, sometimes there is a positive benefit to not admitting a mistake because such an admission could send the whole edifice crashing down (for example, that series of papers on parental characteristics and sex ratios, that we’ve discussed from time to time). [sent-49, score-0.7]
12 More interesting, though, are the cases where it would be no problem to admit error, where the admission would, I’d think, just humanize you. [sent-50, score-0.357]
13 If David Brooks would admit he got fooled by some fishy statistics, or Anderson and Ones would admit they made a mistake in data processing, I’d think that would make them look better, not worse. [sent-51, score-0.538]
14 Are there quarters of journalism and scientific research where you need to act tough and never back down? [sent-55, score-0.273]
15 If David Brooks were to admit an error, would he look like a wimp and not get respect from other newspaper columnists? [sent-56, score-0.246]
16 The never-back-down principle fits with the idea that, if you ever admit you made a mistake, your general position of infallibility becomes untenable . [sent-58, score-0.305]
17 Just to be clear: I don’t think that newspaper columnists and professors actually think they’re infallible. [sent-59, score-0.239]
18 And then they internalize these norms, they act angrily and defensively when people point out mistakes they’ve happened to make. [sent-63, score-0.346]
19 As Coates wrote in a different context, we perhaps need to recognize that it might not be so effective to simply try to instill “middle-class values” in columnists and scientists. [sent-64, score-0.267]
20 To the extent that they continue to live in a world in which it is expected they will never make mistakes, it will be hard for them to give up their traditional folkways. [sent-65, score-0.17]
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Introduction: Ta-Nehisi Coates recently published a fascinating column on the “culture of poverty,” in particular focusing on the idea that behavior that is rational and adaptive in some settings is not so appropriate in others: The set of practices required for a young man to secure his safety on the streets of his troubled neighborhood are not the same as those required to place him on an honor roll . . . The way to guide him through this transition is not to insult his native language. . . . For black men like us, the feeling of having something to lose, beyond honor and face, is foreign. We grew up in communities—New York, Baltimore, Chicago—where the Code of the Streets was the first code we learned. Respect and reputation are everything there. These values are often denigrated by people who have never been punched in the face. But when you live around violence there is no opting out. A reputation for meeting violence with violence is a shield. That protection increases when you are part
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Introduction: Mark Palko is irritated by the Times’s refusal to retract a recounting of a hoax regarding Dickens and Dostoevsky. All I can say is, the Times refuses to retract mistakes of fact that are far more current than that! See here for two examples that particularly annoyed me, to the extent that I contacted various people at the Times but ran into refusals to retract. I guess a daily newspaper publishes so much material that they can’t be expected to run a retraction every time they publish something false, even when such things are brought to their attention. Speaking of corrections, I wonder if later editions of the Samuelson economics textbook discussed their notorious graph predicting Soviet economic performance. The easiest thing would be just to remove the graph, but I think it would be a better economics lesson to discuss the error! Similarly, I think the NYT would do well to run an article on their Dickens-Dostoevsky mistake, along with a column by Arthur Brooks on how
Introduction: I was thinking more about David Brooks’s anti-data column from yesterday, and I realized what is really bothering me. Brooks expresses skepticism about numbers, about the limitations of raw data, about the importance of human thinking. Fine, I agree with all of this, to some extent. But then Brooks turns around uses numbers and unquestioningly and uncritically (OK, not completely uncritically; see P.S. below). In a notorious recent case, Brooks wrote, in the context of college admissions: You’re going to want to argue with Unz’s article all the way along, especially for its narrow, math-test-driven view of merit. But it’s potentially ground-shifting. Unz’s other big point is that Jews are vastly overrepresented at elite universities and that Jewish achievement has collapsed. In the 1970s, for example, 40 percent of top scorers in the Math Olympiad had Jewish names. Now 2.5 percent do. But these numbers are incorrect, as I learned from a professor of oncology at the Univ
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Introduction: The pre-NYT David Brooks liked to make fun of the NYT. Here’s one from 1997 : I’m not sure I’d like to be one of the people featured on the New York Times wedding page, but I know I’d like to be the father of one of them. Imagine how happy Stanley J. Kogan must have been, for example, when his daughter Jamie got into Yale. Then imagine his pride when Jamie made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude. . . . he must have enjoyed a gloat or two when his daughter put on that cap and gown. And things only got better. Jamie breezed through Stanford Law School. And then she met a man—Thomas Arena—who appears to be exactly the sort of son-in-law that pediatric urologists dream about. . . . These two awesome resumes collided at a wedding ceremony . . . It must have been one of the happiest days in Stanley J. Kogan’s life. The rest of us got to read about it on the New York Times wedding page. Brooks is reputed to be Jewish himself so I think it’s ok for him to mock Jewish peop
Introduction: A Brooks op-ed in the New York Times (circulation approximately 1.5 million): People at the extremes are happier than political moderates. . . . none, it seems, are happier than the Tea Partiers . . . Jay Livingston on his blog (circulation approximately 0 (rounding to the nearest million)), giving data from the 2009-2010 General Social Survey, which is the usual place people turn to for population data on happiness of Americans: The GSS does not offer “bitter” or “Tea Party” as choices, but extreme conservatives are nearly three times as likely as others to be “not too happy.” Livingston reports that the sample size for “Extremely Conservative” here is 80. Thus the standard error for that green bar on the right is approx sqrt(0.3*0.7/80)=0.05. So how could Brooks have made such a mistake? I can think of two possibilities: 1. Brooks has some other data source that directly addresses the happiness of supporters of the Tea Party movement. 2. Brooks looked a
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to an interesting article by Terry Teachout on David Mamet’s political conservatism. I don’t think of playwrights as gurus, but I do find it interesting to consider the political orientations of authors and celebrities . I have only one problem with Teachout’s thought-provoking article. He writes: As early as 2002 . . . Arguing that “the Western press [had] embraced antisemitism as the new black,” Mamet drew a sharp contrast between that trendy distaste for Jews and the harsh realities of daily life in Israel . . . In 2006, Mamet published a collection of essays called The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Jewish Self-Hatred and the Jews that made the point even more bluntly. “The Jewish State,” he wrote, “has offered the Arab world peace since 1948; it has received war, and slaughter, and the rhetoric of annihilation.” He went on to argue that secularized Jews who “reject their birthright of ‘connection to the Divine’” succumb in time to a self-hatred tha
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