I just wanted to point out this comment of mine which applies the principles of analysis of variance to an informal model of political opinions and intellectual stances. I hate it when my best lines are buried within a comment thread. (I also hate that I respond to blog comments rather than doing real work, [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Sociology category.
The politics of economic and statistical models
Following up on our recent discussion of the problems of considering utility theory as a foundation for economic analysis (which in turn was a reprise of this post from last September), somebody named Mark pointed me to a 2007 article by Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden, “The road not taken: How psychology was removed from [...]
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 [...]
Those darn physicists
X pointed me to this atrocity: The data on obesity are pretty unequivocal: we’re fat, and we’re getting fatter. Explanations for this trend, however, vary widely, with the blame alternately pinned on individual behaviour, genetics and the environment. In other words, it’s a race between “we eat too much”, “we’re born that way” and “it’s [...]
Calibration!
I went to this place a few months ago after it was reviewed in the Times and I was not impressed at all. Not that I’m any kind of authority on barbecue, this just makes me aware of variation in assessments. Food criticism is like personality profiling in psychometrics: there is no objective truth to [...]
Facebook Profiles as Predictors of Job Performance? Maybe…but not yet.
Eric Loken explains: Some newspapers and radio stations recently picked up a story that Facebook profiles can be revealing, and can yield information more predictive of job performance than typical self-report personality questionnaires or even an IQ test. . . . A most consistent finding from the last 50 years of organizational psychology research is [...]
I’m officially no longer a “rogue”
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 [...]
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 [...]