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 →
1. Axis Zero Regarding the perennial question of whether to have your y-axis start at zero, I wrote, “If zero is in the neighborhood, invite it in.” Kaiser improves this advice by pointing out, first, that you should only worry … Continue reading →
As Ira Glass says, today we have a theme and some variations on this theme. Statistical nitpickers: Do they cause more harm than good? I’d like to think we cause more good than harm, but today I want to consider … Continue reading →
I got to thinking about this after reading a post from Kaiser Fung “offering up 20 paper ideas pre-approved for prestigious journals.” What happened is that JAMA published a silly paper claiming a 12 percent increase in fatal car crashes … Continue reading →
Kaiser Fung announces a new educational venture he’s created, a bootcamp (12-week full-time in-person program with a curriculum) of short courses with a goal of getting people their first job in an analytics role for a business unit (not engineering … Continue reading →
Kaiser gave a presentation and he’s sharing the slides with us here. It’s important stuff.
You may think you have all of the data. You don’t. One of the biggest myth of Big Data is that data alone produce complete answers. Their “data” have done no arguing; it is the humans who are making this … Continue reading →
People keep asking me what I think of Nate’s book, and I keep replying that, as a blogger, I’m spoiled. I’m so used to getting books for free that I wouldn’t go out and buy a book just for the … Continue reading →
In the context of a debate between economists Brad DeLong and Tyler Cowen on the “IS-LM model” [no, I don’t know what it is, either!], Kaiser writes: Since a model is an abstraction, a simplification of reality, no model is … Continue reading →
Here’s Kaiser Fung’s presentation at our consulting mini-symposium. It was interesting to hear about the challenges of in-house consulting at Sirius Satellite Radio.
Tyler Cowen links to a “scary comparison” that claims that “a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year.”
Kaiser Fung looks into this comparison in more detail. As Kaiser puts it: Continue reading →
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 →
Mark Palko points us to a recent update by Robert Yeh et al. of the famous randomized parachute-jumping trial: Palko writes: I also love the way they dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s. The whole thing is … Continue reading →
Kaiser has the story: The recent study tying lack of vaccinations to traffic accidents illustrates everything that is wrong with the state of our peer-reviewed scientific process. The study uses data that do not capture any of the important behavioral … Continue reading →
I was chatting with some people the other day and the ridiculous voodoo study came up, and that reminded me of an article, “The more you play, the more aggressive you become: A long-term experimental study of cumulative violent video … Continue reading →
Kaiser Fung tells the story. First the background: Australia, having pursued a zero Covid policy for most of the pandemic, only allows vaccinated visitors to enter. Djokovic, who’s the world #1 male tennis player, is also a prominent anti-vaxxer. Much … Continue reading →
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 →
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 →
I just saw this interesting applied-focused post by Kaiser Fung on non-significance in A/B testing. Kaiser was responding to a post by Ron Kohavi. I can’t find Kohavi’s note anywhere, but you can read Kaiser’s post to get the picture. … Continue reading →
Here are some things people have sent me lately. They are in no particular order, except that I put the last item last so we could end with some humor. After this, I’ll write a few more blog posts, then … Continue reading →