Jonathan Cantor points me to an opinion piece by psychologist Reid Hastie, “Our Gift for Good Stories Blinds Us to the Truth.” I have mixed feelings about Hastie’s article. On one hand I do think his point is important. It’s not new to me, but presumably it’s new to many readers of bloomberg.com. I like [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Decision Theory category.
Happy news on happiness; what can we believe?
Sharon Jayson writes: The conventional wisdom that’s developed over the past few decades — based on early research — has said parents are less happy, more depressed and have less-satisfying marriages than their childless counterparts. But now, two new studies presented as part of the Population Association of America’s annual meeting suggest that earlier findings [...]
Non-Bayesian analysis of Bayesian agents?
Econometrician and statistician Dale Poirier writes: 24 years ago (1988, Journal of Economics Perspectives) I [Poirier] noted cognitive dissonance among some economists who treat the agents in their theoretical framework as Bayesians, but then analyze the data (even in the same paper!) as a frequentist. Recently, I have found similar cases in cognitive science. I [...]
Value-added assessment political FAIL
Jimmy points me to a sequence of posts (Analyzing Released NYC Value-Added Data Parts 1, 2, 3, 4) by Gary Rubinstein slamming value-added assessment of teachers. A skeptical consensus seems to have arisen on this issue. The teachers groups don’t like the numbers and it seems like none of the reformers trust the numbers enough [...]
Thinking seriously about social science research
I haven’t linked to the Baby Name Wizard in awhile. . . . Laura Wattenberg takes a look at the question, “Does a hard-to-pronounce baby name hurt you?” Critical thinking without “debunking”—this is the way to go.
Procrastination as a positive productivity strategy
Reading this amusing book review on willpower by Will Self (link from Jenny Davidson) reminds me that recently [actually, several months ago; recall that most of this blog is published on a delay], I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting anything done. I think that when I write this sort of thing it annoys people, [...]
Some economists are skeptical about microfoundations
A few months ago, I wrote: Economists seem to rely heavily on a sort of folk psychology, a relic of the 1920s-1950s in which people calculate utilities (or act as if they are doing so) in order to make decisions. A central tenet of economics is that inference or policy recommendation be derived from first [...]
A cloud with a silver lining
For the past few weeks I’ve been in pain much of the time, some sort of spasms in my neck and shoulder. Things are mostly better now, but last night I woke up at 5am and my neck was killing me. On the upside, I’d just been having a dream about multiple imputation and in [...]
“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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Chris Schmid on Evidence Based Medicine
Chris Schmid is a statistician at New England Medical Center who is an expert on evidence-based medicine. I invited him to present an introductory overview lecture on the topic at last year’s Joint Statistical Meetings, and here are his slides. All 123 of them. I don’t know how he expected to go though all of [...]
“Groundbreaking or Definitive? Journals Need to Pick One”
Sanjay Srivastava writes: As long as a journal pursues a strategy of publishing “wow” studies, it will inevitably contain more unreplicable findings and unsupportable conclusions than equally rigorous but more “boring” journals. Groundbreaking will always be higher-risk. And definitive will be the territory of journals that publish meta-analyses and reviews. . . . Most conclusions, [...]
Freakonomics: Why ask “What went wrong?”
A friend/colleague sent me some comments on my recent article with Kaiser Fung on Freakonomics. My friend gave several reasons why he thought we were unfair to Levitt. I’ll give my reply (my friend preferred that I not quote his email, but you can get a general sense of the questions from my answers). But [...]
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Derman, Rodrik and the nature of statistical models
Interesting thoughts from Kaiser Fung. Derman seems to have a point in his criticisms of economic models—and things are just as bad in other social sciences. (I’ve criticized economists and political scientists for taking a crude, 80-year-old model of psychology as “foundational,” but even more sophisticated models in psychology and sociology have a lot of [...]
This one is so dumb it makes me want to barf
Dan Kahan sends in this horror story: A new study finds that atheists are among society’s most distrusted group, comparable even to rapists in certain circumstances. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers. “It’s [...]
Does Avastin work on breast cancer? Should Medicare be paying for it?
Discussion by a panel of experts at the Statistics Forum.
“To Rethink Sprawl, Start With Offices”
According to this op-ed by Louise Mozingo, the fashion for suburban corporate parks is seventy years old: In 1942 the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories moved from its offices in Lower Manhattan to a new, custom-designed facility on 213 acres outside Summit, N.J. The location provided space for laboratories and quiet for acoustical research, and new [...]
The sort of thing that gives technocratic reasoning a bad name
1. Freakonomics characterizes drunk driving as an example of “the human tendency to worry about rare problems that are unlikely to happen.” 2. The CDC reports, “Alcohol-impaired drivers are involved in about 1 in 3 crash deaths, resulting in nearly 11,000 deaths in 2009.” No offense to the tenured faculty at the University of Chicago, [...]
Roads, traffic, and the importance in decision analysis of carefully examining your goals
Sandeep Baliga writes:
Skepticism about skepticism of global warming skepticism skepticism
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 [...]
“There’s at least as much as an 80 percent chance . . .”
Kaiser Fung points to the above self-canceling statement which comes from a quantitatively-trained expert on international debt. I can only assume that he was speaking quickly and that the reporter didn’t know enough to ask him to clarify. When I’m interviewed, I emit a lot of ums, uhs, and probably quite a few meaningless remarks, [...]
Cool job opening with brilliant researchers at Yahoo
Duncan Watts writes: The Human Social Dynamics Group in Yahoo Research is seeking highly qualified candidates for a post-doctoral research scientist position. The Human and Social Dynamics group is devoted to understanding the interplay between individual-level behavior (e.g. how people make decisions about what music they like, which dates to go on, or which groups [...]
Bell Labs
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 [...]