John Williams points us to this post by Jason Collins. Collins criticizes embodied cognition and he’s not a member of the club, so I guess that makes him a methodological terrorist. But he also criticizes the nudgelords and is not a member of that club either, so I guess that makes him Stasi. Remember, Cass […]
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Tableau and the Grammar of Graphics
The first edition of Lee Wilkinson’s book, The Grammar of Graphics came out in 1999. Whether or not you’ve heard of the book, if you’re an R user you’ve almost certainly indirectly heard about the concept, because . . . you know ggplot2? What do you think the “gg” in ggplot2 stands for? That’s right! […]
Responding to Richard Morey on p-values and inference
Jonathan Falk points to this post by Richard Morey, who writes: I [Morey] am convinced that most experienced scientists and statisticians have internalized statistical insights that frequentist statistics attempts to formalize: how you can be fooled by randomness; how what we see can be the result of biasing mechanisms; the importance of understanding sampling distributions. […]
“Off white: A preliminary taxonomy”
Lots has been written on this topic (“How the Irish Became White,” etc.), but this post by Paul Campos is an amusing starting point. As he points out, we often think about race/ethnicity/nationality in the context of U.S. politics, but it’s an issue, one way or another, pretty much everywhere in the world.
Still more on the Heckman Curve!
Carlos Parada writes: Saw your blog post on the Heckman Curve. I went through Heckman’s response that you linked, and it seems to be logically sound but terribly explained, so I feel like I need to explain why Rea+Burton is great empirical work, but it doesn’t actually measure the Heckman curve. The Heckman curve just […]
“The Multiverse of Methods: Extending the Multiverse Analysis to Address Data-Collection Decisions”
Jenna Harder writes: When analyzing data, researchers may have multiple reasonable options for the many decisions they must make about the data—for example, how to code a variable or which participants to exclude. Therefore, there exists a multiverse of possible data sets. A classic multiverse analysis involves performing a given analysis on every potential data […]
Open data and quality: two orthogonal factors of a study
It’s good for a study to have open data, and it’s good for the study to be high quality. If for simplicity we dichotomize these variables, we can find lots of examples in all four quadrants: – Unavailable data, low quality: The notorious ESP paper from 2011 and tons of papers published during that era […]
This one’s for all the Veronica Geng fans out there . . .
I recently read Joseph Lanza’s excellent book from 1994, “Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Musak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong.” I’ll have more to say about this book in a future post, but for now I just had to share this bit I noticed on page 53: Lyndon Baines Johnson owned Muzak franchises in Austin […]
Call for a moratorium on the use of the term “prisoner’s dilemma”
Palko writes: I’m not sure what the best way to get the ball rolling here would be (perhaps a kickstarter?) but we need to have a strictly enforced rule that no journalist or pundit is allowed to mention the prisoner’s dilemma for the next five or ten years, however long it takes to learn to […]
“Analysis challenges slew of studies claiming ocean acidification alters fish behavior”
Lizzie Wolkovich writes: Here’s an interesting new paper in climate change ecology that states, “Using data simulations, we additionally show that the large effect sizes and small within-group variances that have been reported in several previous studies are highly improbable.” I [Lizzie] wish I were more surprised, but mostly I was impressed they did the […]
Chess.com cheater-detection bot pisses someone off
Justin Horton writes: Of course Chess.com are a private company. They have the right, within the law, to have who they want on their site and to ban who they want from their site. What they don’t have the right to do is to call somebody a cheat without backing it up. But that is […]
Can you trust international surveys? A follow-up:
Michael Robbins writes: A few years ago you covered a significant controversy in the survey methods literature about data fabrication in international survey research. Noble Kuriakose and I put out a proposed test for data quality. At the time there were many questions raised about the validity of this test. As such, I thought you […]
Counterfactual history and historical fiction
In her book, “Telling it like it wasn’t: The counterfactual imagination in history and fiction,” Catherine Gallagher usefully distinguishes between three sorts of historical speculation: 1. Counterfactual histories which are “generally analytical rather than narrative” and “indicate multiple possibilities that went unrealized rather than to trace out single historical alternative trajectories in detail.” 2. Alternate […]
More on the epidemiologists who other epidemiologists don’t trust
You know how they’ll describe someone as a musician’s musician? Or a chef’s chef? There’s also the opposite: those people who to outsiders represent a certain profession, but who are not respected by their fellow insiders. An example is the team at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Paul Alper […]
“Like a harbor clotted with sunken vessels”: update
A few years ago I reported on this story: In 2005, Michael Kosfeld, Markus Heinrichs, Paul Zak, Urs Fischbacher, and Ernst Fehr published a paper, “Oxytocin increases trust in humans.” According to Google, that paper has been cited 3389 times. In 2015, Gideon Nave, Colin Camerer, and Michael McCullough published a paper, “Does Oxytocin Increase […]
One reason why that estimated effect of Fox News could’ve been so implausibly high.
Ethan Kaplan writes: I just happened upon a post of yours on the potential impact of Fox News on the 2016 election [“No, I don’t buy that claim that Fox news is shifting the vote by 6 percentage points“]. I am one of the authors of the first Fox News study from 2007 (DellaVigna and […]
Which sorts of posts get more blog comments?
Paul Alper writes: Some of your blog postings elicit many responses and some, rather few. Have you ever thought of displaying some sort of statistical graph illustrating the years of data? For example, sports vs. politics, or responses for one year vs. another (time series), winter vs. summer, highly technical vs. breezy. I’ve not done […]
More on that credulity thing
I see five problems here that together form a feedback loop with bad consequences. Here are the problems: 1. Irrelevant or misunderstood statistical or econometric theory 2. Poorly-executed research 3. Other people in the field being loath to criticize, taking published or even preprinted claims as correct until proved otherwise 4. Journalists taking published or […]
PNAS is just another blog
The police department, is like a crew It does whatever they want to do In society you have illegal and legal We need both, to make things equal So legal is tobacco, illegal is speed Legal is aspirin, illegal is weed Crack is illegal, cause they cannot stop ya But cocaine is legal if it’s […]
Probabilistic feature analysis of facial perception of emotions
With Michel Meulders, Paul De Boeck, and Iven Van Mechelen, from 2005 (but the research was done several years earlier): According to the hypothesis of configural encoding, the spatial relationships between the parts of the face function as an additional source of information in the facial perception of emotions. The paper analyses experimental data on […]