Mark Palko writes: I can understand the appeal of the cutting edge. The new stuff is sexier. It gets people’s attention. The trouble is, those cutting edge studies often collapse under scrutiny. Some can’t be replicated. Others prove to be not that important. Confirmation, on the other hand, is not sexy. It doesn’t drive traffic. [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Decision Theory category.
How do you think about the values in a confidence interval?
Philip Jones writes: As an interested reader of your blog, I wondered if you might consider a blog entry sometime on the following question I posed on CrossValidated (StackExchange). I originally posed the question based on my uncertainty about 95% CIs: “Are all values within the 95% CI equally likely (probable), or are the values [...]
Free advice from an academic writing coach!
Basbøll writes: I [Basbøll] have got to come up with forty things to say [in the next few months]. . . . What would you like me to write about?
Did Steven Levitt really believe in 2008 that Obama “would be the greatest president in history”?
In the interview we discussed a couple months ago, Steven Levitt said: I [Levitt] voted for Obama [in 2008] because I wanted to tell my grandchildren that I voted for Obama. And I thought that he would be the greatest president in history. This surprised me. I’d assumed Levitt was a McCain supporter! Why? Because [...]
A important new survey of Bayesian predictive methods for model assessment, selection and comparison
Aki Vehtari and Janne Ojanen just published a long paper that begins: To date, several methods exist in the statistical literature for model assessment, which purport themselves specifically as Bayesian predictive methods. The decision theoretic assumptions on which these methods are based are not always clearly stated in the original articles, however. The aim of [...]
The Möbius strip, or, marketing that is impervious to criticism
Johnny Carson had this great trick where, after a joke bombed, he’d do such a good double-take that he’d end up getting a huge laugh. This gimmick could never have worked as his sole shtick—at some point, Johnny had to tell some good jokes—but it was a reliable way to limit the downside. For the [...]
“I coach the jumpers here at Boise State . . .”
Jeff Petersmeyer writes: I coach the jumpers here at Boise State and as a fan of the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis (the book that got my brain initially wired to look further than just recruiting the “best” jumpers out of high school (as listed by Track and Field News, etc), I have tried to [...]
Can gambling addicts be identified in gambling venues?
Mark Griffiths, a psychologist who apparently is Europe’s only Professor of Gambling Studies, writes: You made the comment about how difficult it is to spot problem gamblers. I and a couple of colleagues [Paul Delfabbro and Daniel Kingjust] published this review of all the research done on spotting problem gamblers in online and offline gaming [...]
GiveWell charity recommendations
In a rare Christmas-themed post here, I pass along this note from Alexander Berger at GiveWell: We just published a blog post following up on the *other* famous piece of evidence for deworming, the Miguel and Kremer experiment from Kenya. They shared data and code from their working paper (!) follow-up finding that deworming increases incomes ten [...]
The consulting biz
I received the following (unsolicited) email: Hello, *** LLC, a ***-based market research company, has a financial client who is interested in speaking with a statistician who has done research in the field of Alzheimer’s Disease and preferably familiar with the SOLA and BAPI trials. We offer an honorarium of $200 for a 30 minute [...]
There are four ways to get fired from Caesars: (1) theft, (2) sexual harassment, (3) running an experiment without a control group, and (4) keeping a gambling addict away from the casino
Ever since I got this new sound system for my bike, I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. This American Life is really good. I know, I know, everybody knows that, but it’s true. The only segments I don’t like are the ones that are too “writerly,” when they read a short story aloud. [...]
The Case for More False Positives in Anti-doping Testing
Kaiser Fung was ahead of the curve on Lance Armstrong: The media has gotten the statistics totally backwards. On the one hand, they faithfully report the colorful stories of athletes who fail drug tests pleading their innocence. (I have written about the Spanish cyclist Alberto Contador here.) On the other hand, they unquestioningly report athletes [...]
The p-value is not . . .
From a recent email exchange: I agree that you should never compare p-values directly. The p-value is a strange nonlinear transformation of data that is only interpretable under the null hypothesis. Once you abandon the null (as we do when we observe something with a very low p-value), the p-value itself becomes irrelevant. To put [...]
Somebody listened to me!
Several months ago, I wrote: One challenge, though, is that uncovering the problem [of scientific fraud] and forcing the retraction is a near-thankless job. That’s one reason I don’t mind if Uri Simonsohn is treated as some sort of hero or superstar for uncovering multiple cases of research fraud. Some people might feel there’s something [...]
“The scientific literature must be cleansed of everything that is fraudulent, especially if it involves the work of a leading academic”
Someone points me to this report from Tilburg University on disgraced psychology researcher Diederik Stapel. The reports includes bits like this: When the fraud was first discovered, limiting the harm it caused for the victims was a matter of urgency. This was particularly the case for Mr Stapel’s former PhD students and postdoctoral researchers . [...]
More consulting experiences, this time in computational linguistics
Bob wrote this long comment that I think is worth posting: I [Bob] have done a fair bit of consulting for my small natural language processing company over the past ten years. Like statistics, natural language processing is something may companies think they want, but have no idea how to do themselves. We almost always [...]
Should Harvard start admitting kids at random?
Tyler Cowen links to an article where Ron Unz provides evidence that Jews are way overrepresented at Ivy League colleges, with Asians-Americans and non-Jewish whites correspondingly underrepresented. Unz attributes this to bias and pressure in the admissions office and recommends that, instead, top colleges should switch to a system based purely academic credentials (he never [...]
No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man
Part 1. The ideal policy Basbøll, as always, gets right to the point: Andrew Gelman is not the plagiarism police because there is no such thing as the plagiarism police. But, he continues: There is, at any self-respecting university and any self-respecting academic journal, a plagiarism policy, and there sure as hell is a “morality” [...]
A question about voting systems—unrelated to U.S. elections!
Jan Vecer writes about a new voting system that is now being considered in the Czech Republic which faces a political crisis where some elected officials became corrupted:
That last satisfaction at the end of the career
I just finished reading an amusing but somewhat disturbing article by Mark Singer, a reporter for the New Yorker who follows in that magazine’s tradition of writing about amiable frauds. (For those who are keeping score at home, Singer employs a McKelway-style relaxed tolerance rather than Liebling-style pyrotechnics.) Singer’s topic was a midwestern dentist named [...]
Let’s try this: Instead of saying, “The probability is 75%,” say “There’s a 25% chance I’m wrong”
I recently wrote about the difficulty people have with probabilities, in this case the probability that Obama wins the election. If the probability is reported as 70%, people think Obama is going to win. Actually, though, it just means that Obama is predicted to get about 50.8% of the two-party vote, with an uncertainty of [...]
Someone is wrong on the internet
I made the mistake of googling myself (I know, I know . . .) and came across a couple of rude bloggers criticizing something I’d written. I don’t mind criticism, and lord knows I can be a rude blogger myself at times, but these criticisms were really bad, a mix of already-refuted arguments and new [...]
Not so fast on levees and seawalls for NY harbor?
I was talking with June Williamson and mentioned offhand that I’d seen something in the paper saying that if only we’d invested a few billion dollars in levees we would’ve saved zillions in economic damage from the flood. (A quick search also revealed this eerily prescient article from last month and, more recently, this online [...]
Is it meaningful to talk about a probability of “65.7%” that Obama will win the election?
The other day we had a fun little discussion in the comments section of the sister blog about the appropriateness of stating forecast probabilities to the nearest tenth of a percentage point. It started when Josh Tucker posted this graph from Nate Silver: My first reaction was: this looks pretty but it’s hyper-precise. I’m a [...]
“Intrade to the 57th power”
David Pennock writes: http://PredictWiseQ.com is our (beta) prediction contest which aims to estimate not just the marginal probabilities of election outcomes this November, but millions of correlations among outcomes as well, like the chance Obama will win both Ohio and Florida, or the chance Romney will win if the September jobs numbers are negative. It’s [...]