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 [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Sociology category.
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.
“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 [...]
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.”
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 [...]
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:
Suggested resolution of the Bem paradox
There has been an increasing discussion about the proliferation of flawed research in psychology and medicine, with some landmark events being John Ioannides’s article, “Why most published research findings are false” (according to Google Scholar, cited 973 times since its appearance in 2005), the scandals of Marc Hauser and Diederik Stapel, two leading psychology professors [...]
Lessons learned from a recent R package submission
R has zillions of packages, and people are submitting new ones each day. The volunteers who keep R going are doing an incredibly useful service to the profession, and they’re busy. A colleague sends in some suugestions based on a recent experience with a package update: 1. Always use the R dev version to write [...]
Sharon Begley: Worse than Stephen Jay Gould?
Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science [...]
Fun fight over the Grover search algorithm
Joshua Vogelstein points me to this blog entry by Robert Tucci, diplomatically titled “Unethical or Really Dumb (or both) Scientists from University of Adelaide ‘Rediscover’ My Version of Grover’s Algorithm”:
A model rejection letter
Howard Wainer sends in this rejection letter from Sir David Brewster of The Edinburgh Journal of Science to Charles Babbage: It is no inconsiderable degree of reluctance that I decline the offer of any Paper from you. I think, however, you will upon reconsideration of the subject be of the opinion that I have no [...]
Blogging, polemical and otherwise
In a discussion of Paul Krugman and his critics, Noah Smith compares two styles of argumentation: Way #1 is to put your complete thought process on a page – to lay out both sides of an argument, and explain why you arrived at a conclusion. This is what [Tyler] Cowen calls the “Humean” method, after [...]
Google correlate links statistics with minorities
John Eppley asks what I make of this: Eppley is guessing the negative spikes are searches getting swamped by holiday season shoppers.
Econ debate about prices at a fancy restaurant
Felix Salmon writes: Economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have a problem with Grant Achatz’s pricing strategy at Next, where tickets are sold at a fixed price and are then free to be resold at an enormous markup on the secondary market . . . “It’s democratic in theory, but not in practice,” said Wolfers [...]
Unconvincing defense of the recent Russian elections, and a problem when an official organ of an academic society has low standards for publication
Last month we reported on some claims of irregularities in the recent Russian elections. Just as a reminder, here are a couple graphs: Yesterday someone pointed me to two online articles: Mathematical proof of fraud in Russian elections unsound and US elections are as ‘non-normal’ as Russian elections. I know nothing about Russian elections and [...]
Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives
Chris Paulse points me to this book by Ruth Grant: Incentives can be found everywhere–in schools, businesses, factories, and government–influencing people’s choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed [...]
Argument in favor of Ddulites
Mark Palko defines a Ddulite as follows: A preference for higher tech solutions even in cases where lower tech alternatives have greater and more appropriate functionality; a person of ddulite tendencies. Though Ddulites are the opposite of Luddites with respect to attitudes toward technology, they occupy more or less the same point with respect to [...]
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 [...]
Presenting at the econ seminar
Jim Savage saw this and pointed me to this video. I didn’t actually look at it, but given that it is labeled, “For new econ Ph.D.’s about to look for a job . . . what you might expect when you give your first talk presenting your research,” I can pretty much guess what it’ll [...]
Towards a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers
Hey, this looks cool: Towards a Theory of Trust in Networks of Humans and Computers Virgil Gligor Carnegie Mellon University We argue that a general theory of trust in networks of humans and computers must be build on both a theory of behavioral trust and a theory of computational trust. This argument is motivated by [...]
Krugman disses Hayek as “being almost entirely about politics rather than economics”
That’s ok, Krugman earlier slammed Galbraith. (I wonder if Krugman is as big a fan of “tough choices” now as he was in 1996.) Given Krugman’s politicization in recent years, I’m surprised he’s so dismissive of the political (rather than technical-economic) nature of Hayek’s influence. (I don’t know if he’s changed his views on Galbraith [...]
I just flew in from the econ seminar, and boy are my arms tired
I’ve heard all sorts of scare stories of what it’s like to speak in an academic economics seminar: they’re rude, they interrupt constantly, they don’t let you get through three slides in an hour, etc. But whenever I’ve actually spoke in an economics department, the people have been polite and well-behaved, really it’s been like [...]
Donate Your Data to Science!
James Fowler and Mark Pletcher write: Please sign up for our new study. And tell all your friends about it. Our goal is to get one million people to donate their data to science. It takes about 10 minutes to sign up, and everyone 18 and over with an internet account is eligible. Plus, once [...]
Progress for the Poor
Lane Kenworthy writes: The book is full of graphs that support the above claims. One thing I like about Kenworthy’s approach is that he performs a separate analysis to examine each of his hypotheses. A lot of social scientists seem to think that the ideal analysis will conclude with a big regression where each coefficient [...]