In our Freakonomics: What Went Wrong article, Kaiser and I wrote: Levitt’s publishers characterize him as a “rogue economist,” yet he received his Ph.D. from MIT, holds the title of Alvin H. Baum Professor at the University of Chicago, and has served as editor of the completely mainstream Journal of Political Economy. Further “rogue” credentials [...]
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“Readability” as freedom from the actual sensation of reading
In her essay on Margaret Mitchell and Gone With the Wind, Claudia Roth Pierpoint writes: The much remarked “readability” of the book must have played a part in this smooth passage from the page to the screen, since “readability” has to do not only with freedom from obscurity but, paradoxically, with freedom from the actual [...]
How many data points do you really have?
Chris Harrison writes:
Joshua Clover update
Surfing the blogroll, I found myself on Helen DeWitt’s page and noticed the link to the Joshua Clover, alias Jane Dark. I hadn’t checked out Clover for awhile (see my reactions here and here), so I decided to head on over. Here’s what it looked like: “The case against the Federal minimum wage,” huh? That [...]
Standardized writing styles and standardized graphing styles
Back in the 1700s—JennyD can correct me if I’m wrong here—there was no standard style for writing. You could be discursive, you could be descriptive, flowery, or terse. Direct or indirect, serious or funny. You could construct a novel out of letters or write a philosophical treatise in the form of a novel. Nowadays there [...]
Not as ugly as you look
Kaiser asks the interesting question: How do you measure what restaurants are “overrated”? You can’t just ask people, right? There’s some sort of social element here, that “overrated” implies that someone’s out there doing the rating.
Sports examples in class
Karl Broman writes: I [Karl] personally would avoid sports entirely, as I view the subject to be insufficiently serious. . . . Certainly lots of statisticians are interested in sports. . . . And I’m not completely uninterested in sports: I like to watch football, particularly Nebraska, Green Bay, and Baltimore, and to see Notre [...]
A previous discussion with Charles Murray about liberals, conservatives, and social class
From 2.5 years ago. Read all the comments; the discussion is helpful.
“False-positive psychology”
Everybody’s talkin bout this paper by Joseph Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn, who write: Despite empirical psychologists’ nominal endorsement of a low rate of false-positive findings (≤ .05), flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting dramatically increases actual false-positive rates. In many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an [...]
Charles Murray on the new upper class
The other day I posted some comments on the voting patterns of rich and poor in the context of Charles Murray’s recent book, “Coming Apart.” My graphs on income and voting are just fine, but I mischaracterized Murray’s statements. So I want to fix that right away. After that I have some thoughts on the [...]
The tabloids strike again
See comments #2,3,4 here. I guess that’s why Science and Nature are known as “the tabloids.” As the commenter writes, “you can’t have people look at too many images of maggot-infested wounds.”
Extra babies on Valentine’s Day, fewer on Halloween?
Just in time for the holiday, X pointed me to an article by Becca Levy, Pil Chung, and Martin Slade reporting that, during a recent eleven-year period, more babies were born on Valentine’s Day and fewer on Halloween compared to neighboring days: What I’d really like to see is a graph with all 366 days [...]
Recently in the sister blog
Lingsanity! What the sophisticates thought in September 2008 Political opinions of U.S. military The origin of essentialist reasoning
Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Wasserman
Continuing with my discussion of the articles in the special issue of the journal Rationality, Markets and Morals on the philosophy of Bayesian statistics: Larry Wasserman, “Low Assumptions, High Dimensions”: This article was refreshing to me because it was so different from anything I’ve seen before. Larry works in a statistics department and I work [...]
Meta-analysis, game theory, and incentives to do replicable research
One of the key insights of game theory is to solve problems in reverse time order. You first figure out what you would do in the endgame, then decide a middle-game strategy to get you where you want to be at the end, then you choose an opening that will take you on your desired [...]
Adding an error model to a deterministic model
Daniel Lakeland asks, “Where do likelihoods come from?” He describes a class of problems where you have a deterministic dynamic model that you want to fit to data. The data won’t fit perfectly so, if you want to do Bayesian inference, you need to introduce an error model. This looks a little bit different from [...]
If an entire article in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis were put together from other, unacknowledged, sources, would that be a work of art?
Spy novelist Jeremy Duns tells the amazing story of Quentin Rowan, a young writer who based an entire career on patching together stories based on uncredited material from published authors, culminating in a patchwork job that Duns had blurbed as an “instant classic.” Rowan did not merely plagiarize to fill in some gaps or cover [...]
Familial Linkage between Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Intellectual Interests
When I spoke at Princeton last year, I talked with neuroscientist Sam Wang, who told me about a project he did surveying incoming Princeton freshmen about mental illness in their families. He and his coauthor Benjamin Campbell found some interesting results, which they just published: A link between intellect and temperament has long been the [...]
Charles Murray [perhaps] does a Tucker Carlson, provoking me to unleash the usual torrent of graphs
Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson, that the top 5% of incomes “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” [I’ve [...]
Philosophy of Bayesian statistics: my reactions to Hendry
Continuing with my discussion here and here of the articles in the special issue of the journal Rationality, Markets and Morals on the philosophy of Bayesian statistics: David Hendry, “Empirical Economic Model Discovery and Theory Evaluation”: Hendry presents a wide-ranging overview of scientific learning, with an interesting comparison of physical with social sciences. (For some [...]
Bayesian model-building by pure thought: Some principles and examples
This is one of my favorite papers: In applications, statistical models are often restricted to what produces reasonable estimates based on the data at hand. In many cases, however, the principles that allow a model to be restricted can be derived theoretically, in the absence of any data and with minimal applied context. We illustrate [...]
What is a prior distribution?
Some recent blog discussion revealed some confusion that I’ll try to resolve here. I wrote that I’m not a big fan of subjective priors. Various commenters had difficulty with this point, and I think the issue was most clearly stated by Bill Jeffreerys, who wrote: It seems to me that your prior has to reflect [...]
“Turn a Boring Bar Graph into a 3D Masterpiece”
Jimmy sends in this. Steps include “Make whimsical sparkles by drawing an ellipse using the Ellipse Tool,” “Rotate the sparkles . . . Give some sparkles less Opacity by using the Transparency Palette,” and “Add a haze around each sparkle by drawing a white ellipse using the Ellipse Tool.” The punchline: Now, the next time [...]
More on the economic benefits of universities
Last year my commenters and I discussed Ed Glaeser’s claim that the way to create a great city is to “create a great university and wait 200 years.” I passed this on to urbanist Richard Florida and received the following response: