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 Zombies category.
Joshua Clover update
Surfing the blogroll, I found myself on Helen DeWitt’s page and noticed the link to the Joshua Clover, alias Jane Dark. I hadn’t checked out Clover for awhile (see my reactions here and here), so I decided to head on over. Here’s what it looked like: “The case against the Federal minimum wage,” huh? That [...]
If an entire article in Computational Statistics and Data Analysis were put together from other, unacknowledged, sources, would that be a work of art?
Spy novelist Jeremy Duns tells the amazing story of Quentin Rowan, a young writer who based an entire career on patching together stories based on uncredited material from published authors, culminating in a patchwork job that Duns had blurbed as an “instant classic.” Rowan did not merely plagiarize to fill in some gaps or cover [...]
Charles Murray [perhaps] does a Tucker Carlson, provoking me to unleash the usual torrent of graphs
Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson, that the top 5% of incomes “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” [I’ve [...]
What is a prior distribution?
Some recent blog discussion revealed some confusion that I’ll try to resolve here. I wrote that I’m not a big fan of subjective priors. Various commenters had difficulty with this point, and I think the issue was most clearly stated by Bill Jeffreerys, who wrote: It seems to me that your prior has to reflect [...]
“Turn a Boring Bar Graph into a 3D Masterpiece”
Jimmy sends in this. Steps include “Make whimsical sparkles by drawing an ellipse using the Ellipse Tool,” “Rotate the sparkles . . . Give some sparkles less Opacity by using the Transparency Palette,” and “Add a haze around each sparkle by drawing a white ellipse using the Ellipse Tool.” The punchline: Now, the next time [...]
Web equation
Aleks sends along this app which, while cute, is not quite “killer” for me. I find it more difficult to write the equation using the trackpad than to simply type it in using Latex! But I suppose it could be useful to beginners who want their papers to look more like science.
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 [...]
Difficulties in publishing non-replications of implausible findings
Eric Tassone points me to this news article by Christopher Shea on the challenges of debunking ESP. Shea writes: Earlier this year, a major psychology journal published a paper suggesting that there was some evidence for “pre-cognition,” a form of ESP. Stuart Ritchie, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh, is part of a [...]
Fight! (also a bit of reminiscence at the end)
Martin Lindquist and Michael Sobel published a fun little article in Neuroimage on models and assumptions for causal inference with intermediate outcomes. As their subtitle indicates (“A response to the comments on our comment”), this is a topic of some controversy. Lindquist and Sobel write: Our original comment (Lindquist and Sobel, 2011) made explicit the [...]
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 [...]
Approaching harmonic convergence
Check out comment #9 here. All we need is for Steven Levitt, David Runciman, and some Reader in Management somewhere to weigh in and we’ll be all set.
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 [...]
This guy has a regular column at Reuters
Gregg Easterbrook: Gingrich is a wild card. He probably would end up a flaming wreckage in electoral terms, but there’s a chance he could become seen as the man unafraid to bring sweeping change to an ossified Washington, D.C. There’s perhaps a 90 percent likelihood Obama would wipe the floor with Gingrich, versus a 10 [...]
Reading a research paper != agreeing with its claims
A journalist wrote to me recently: I was going to include your deconstruction of the beautiful daughters paper, but ran out of space. The author, incidentally, stands by that paper — and emailed me that you’d advised him on a later paper, implying that meant you now accepted the thesis! I responded: I know that [...]
Not quite getting the point
I gave this talk the other day and afterwards, a white guy came up to me and said he thought it was no coincidence that the researcher who made the mistake was “Oriental.” He then went on for about 5 minutes explaining his theory. I couldn’t keep myself from laughing—I had to start coughing into [...]
“The difference between . . .”: It’s not just p=.05 vs. p=.06
The title of this post by Sanjay Srivastava illustrates an annoying misconception that’s crept into the (otherwise delightful) recent publicity related to my article with Hal Stern, he difference between “significant” and “not significant” is not itself statistically significant. When people bring this up, they keep referring to the difference between p=0.05 and p=0.06, making [...]
Freakonomics: What went wrong?
Kaiser and I tell the story. Regular readers will be familiar with much of this material. We kept our article short because of space restrictions at American Scientist magazine. Now I want to do a follow-up with all the good stories that we had to cut. P.S. Let me remind everyone once again that Freakonomics [...]
Timing is everything!
A colleague emailed me with a question about the methods used by Groseclose and Milyo in their study of media bias. Before getting to the question, I just wanted to comment that Groseclose has had really bad timing with this project. First off, his article came out in 2005 when everybody was hating Bush. Even [...]
Absolutely last Niall Ferguson post ever, in which I offer him serious advice
I made the mistake of reading this article by Niall Ferguson summarizing his notorious new book. Here’s the best bit:
Lamentably common misunderstanding of meritocracy
Tyler Cowen pointed to an article by business-school professor Luigi Zingales about meritocracy. I’d expect a b-school prof to support the idea of meritocracy, and Zingales does not disappoint. But he says a bunch of other things that to me represent a confused conflation of ideas. Here’s Zingales: America became known as a land of [...]
Going Beyond the Book: Towards Critical Reading in Statistics Teaching
My article with the above title is appearing in the journal Teaching Statistics. Here’s the introduction: We can improve our teaching of statistical examples from books by collecting further data, reading cited articles and performing further data analysis. This should not come as a surprise, but what might be new is the realization of how [...]
Robert H. Frank and P. J. O’Rourke present . . .
I suppose if I can write an article with George Romero, there’s no reason that a noted economist and a legendary humorist can’t collaborate (link from Felix Salmon). I wonder how they got together in the first place?