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 [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Decision Theory category.
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 [...]
Latest in evil blog advertising
I received the following message from “Patricia Lopez” of “Premium Link Ads”: Hello, I am interested in placing a text link on your page: http://andrewgelman.com/2011/07/super_sam_fuld/. The link would point to a page on a website that is relevant to your page and may be useful to your site visitors. We would be happy to compensate [...]
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 [...]
Steve Jobs’s cancer and science-based medicine
Interesting discussion from David Gorski (which I found via this link from Joseph Delaney). I don’t have anything really to add to this discussion except to note the value of this sort of anecdote in a statistics discussion. It’s only n=1 and adds almost nothing to the literature on the effectiveness of various treatments, but [...]
Comparing prediction errors
Someone named James writes:
That advice not to work so hard
We often hear that at the end of life, people often wish they hadn’t worked so hard. (I’m assuming this is coming from executive types who have the option of working less, not people who had to work hard just to put food on the table.) I don’t understand this. Work is ok, but in [...]
Economists don’t think like accountants—but maybe they should
Joseph Delaney quotes Frances Woolley: In other words, the reason we care about inequality is that it reduces the happiness achievable from a given amount of income. How much depends upon the happiness/income relationship. Does the marginal utility of income fall rapidly? Or is the happiness from the 100,000th dollar almost as great as the [...]
n = 2
People in Chicago are nice. The conductor on the train came by and I asked if I could buy a ticket right there. He said yes, $2.50. While I was getting the money he asked if the ticket machine at the station had been broken. I said, I don’t know, I saw the train and [...]
Some thoughts on academic cheating, inspired by Frey, Wegman, Fischer, Hauser, Stapel
As regular readers of this blog are aware, I am fascinated by academic and scientific cheating and the excuses people give for it. Bruno Frey and colleagues published a single article (with only minor variants) in five different major journals, and these articles did not cite each other. And there have been several other cases [...]
What’s “the definition of a professional career”?
Last month I expressed disagreement the following statement from New Republic columnist Jonathan Chait, who wrote: The old liberal slogan always demanded that we “treat teachers like professionals.” That entails some measure of accountability—we can debate the metrics—which allows both that very bad teachers be fired and that very good ones can obtain greater pay [...]
Why it doesn’t make sense in general to form confidence intervals by inverting hypothesis tests
Peter Bergman points me to this discussion from Cyrus of a presentation by Guido Imbens on design of randomized experiments. Cyrus writes: The standard analysis that Imbens proposes includes (1) a Fisher-type permutation test of the sharp null hypothesis–what Imbens referred to as “testing”–along with a (2) Neyman-type point estimate of the sample average treatment [...]