Kaiser Fung’s review of “Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life” (and a connection to “Evidence-based medicine eats itself”)

Kaiser writes: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has a new book out early this year, “Don’t Trust Your Gut”, which he kindly sent me for review. The book is Malcolm Gladwell meets Tim Ferriss – part counter intuition, part self help. Seth tackles … Continue reading

Freakonomics 2: What went wrong?

Following up on Kaiser’s death-by-a-thousand-cuts (see here and here),
Mark Palko adds an entry in the “What happened with Freakonomics 2?” sweepstakes.

Palko’s theory is that Levitt and Dubner’s most logical decision, from a cost-benefit perspective, was to avoid peer review (here I’m using the term generally, considering statisticians such as Kaiser Fung as “peers” whether or not the reviewing is done in the context of a formal journal submission) so as to get a marketable product out the door with minimal effort:

I [Palko] am not saying that Levitt and Dubner knew there were mistakes here. Quite the opposite. I’m saying they had a highly saleable manuscript ready to go which contained no errors that they knew of, and that any additional checking of the facts, the analyses or logic in the manuscript could only serve to make the book less saleable, to delay its publication or to put the authors in the ugly position of publishing something they knew to be wrong.

I think this theory has a lot going for it, although maybe it could be framed in a slightly more positive way. Consider my favorite of Kaiser’s comments on Freakonomics 2: Continue reading

Blogs We Read

Statistics and Machine Learning Christian Robert Error Statistics Philosophy [Deborah Mayo] Observational Epidemiology [Mark Palko and Joseph Delaney] R bloggers Sharon Lohr Statistical Thinking [Frank Harrell] The Endeavour [John Cook] Thomas Lumley Visualization The Functional Art [Alberto Cairo] Junk Charts … Continue reading

The “story time” is to lull us in with a randomized controlled experiment and as we fall asleep, feed us less reliable conclusions that come from an embedded observational study.

Kaiser Fung explains. This comes up a lot, and his formulation in the above title is a good way of putting it. He also has this discussion of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine trial results which makes me want to just do … Continue reading