Kevin Lewis points us to this article, “Do US TRAP Laws Trap Women Into Bad Jobs?”, which begins: This study explores the impact of women’s access to reproductive healthcare on labor market opportunities in the US. Previous research finds that access to the contraception pill delayed age at first birth and increased access to a […]
Archive of posts filed under the Sociology category.
Their findings don’t replicate, but they refuse to admit they might’ve messed up. (We’ve seen this movie before.)
Ricardo Vieira writes: I have been reading the replication efforts by the datacolada team (in particular Leif Nelson and Joe Simmons). You have already mentioned some of their work here and here. They have just published the #7 installation of the series, and I felt it was a good time to summarize the results for […]
Some possibly different experiences of being a statistician working with an international collaborative research group like OHDSI.
This post is by Keith O’Rourke and as with all posts and comments on this blog, is just a deliberation on dealing with uncertainties in scientific inquiry and should not to be attributed to any entity other than the author. Starting at the end of March, I thought it would be good idea to let […]
Some thoughts inspired by Lee Cronbach (1975), “Beyond the two disciplines of scientific psychology”
I happened to come across this article today. It’s hardly obscure—it has over 3000 citations, according to Google scholar—but it was new to me. It’s a wonderful article. You should read it right away. OK, click on the above link and read the article. Done? OK, then read on.
That “not a real doctor” thing . . . It’s kind of silly for people to think that going to medical school for a few years will give you the skills necessary to be able to evaluate research claims in medicine or anything else.
Paul Alper points us to this news article by Abby Phillip, “How a fake doctor made millions from ‘the Dr. Oz Effect’ and a bogus weight-loss supplement,” which begins: When Lindsey Duncan appeared on “The Dr. Oz Show” in 2012, he was introduced as a “naturopathic doctor” and a certified nutritionist. . . . But […]
Updates of bad forecasts: Let’s follow them up and see what happened!
People make bad forecasts, then they move on. Do the forecasts ever get fixed? Do experts learn from their mistakes? Let’s look at three examples. 1. The economist who kept thinking that the Soviets were catching up Paul Samuelson: Yes, the above graph was from 1961, but “in subsequent editions Samuelson presented the same analysis […]
Which experts should we trust?
In a comment on our post, “Expert writes op-ed in NYT recommending that we trust the experts,” commenter DCE writes: Perhaps this post can have a follow-up on “How do I choose which experts to believe?” While broadly, Pigliucci’s “Nonsense on Stilts” offers some good discussion, there is the real issue of ulterior motives in […]
The history of low-hanging intellectual fruit
Alex Tabarrok asks, why was the game Dungeons and Dragons, or something like it, not invented in ancient Rome? He argues that the ancient Romans had the technology (that would be dice, I guess) so why didn’t someone thing of inventing a random-number-driven role-playing game? I don’t have an answer, but I think we can […]
“Which, in your personal judgment, is worse, if you could only choose ONE? — (a) A homosexual (b) A doctor who refuses to make a house call to someone seriously ill?”
Old polls are the greatest. From the Harris 1969 Changing Morality Survey: How many people knew a gay person? The gay penumbra was pretty small back then. Only something like 12% of the population said they knew a gay person. Or maybe 12% is a lot; I’m not quite sure how to think about this […]
Negativity (when applied with rigor) requires more care than positivity.
Tyler Cowen writes: Avoid criticizing other public intellectuals. In fact, avoid the negative as much as possible. However pressing a social or economic issue may be, there is almost always a positive and constructive way to reframe your potential contribution. This also will force you to keep on thinking harder, because it is easier to […]
Male bisexuality gets Big PNAS Energy
Do flowers exist at night?—John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch I have very little to say here, except to let you all know that the venerable PNAS has today published a paper (edited by Steven Pinker) letting use know that male bisexuality exists. Here it is: Robust evidence for bisexual orientation among men (The paper […]
Can the science community help journalists avoid science hype? It won’t be easy.
tl;dr: Selection bias. The public letter Michael Eisen and Rob Tibshirani write: Researchers have responded to the challenge of the coronavirus with a commitment to speed and cooperation, featuring the rapid sharing of preliminary findings through “preprints,” scientific manuscripts that have not yet undergone formal peer review. . . . But the open dissemination of […]
“Sorry, there is no peer review to display for this article.” Huh? Whassup, BMJ?
OK, this is weird. Yesterday we reported on an article with questionable statistical analysis published in the British Medical Journal. This one’s different from some other examples we’ve discussed recently (Surgisphere and Stanford) in that the author list of this recent article includes several statisticians. One way to get a handle on this situation is […]
Conflicting public attitudes on redistribution
Sociologist David Weakliem wrote recently: A Quinnipiac poll from April 2019: “Do you support or oppose raising the tax rate to 70% on an individual’s income that is over $10 million dollars?” 36% support, 59% oppose A CNN poll from February 2019: “Would you favor or oppose raising the personal income tax rate for those […]
The “scientist as hero” narrative
We’ve talked about the problems with the scientist-as-hero paradigm; see “Narrative #1” discussed here. And, more recently, we’ve considered how this narrative has been clouding people’s thinking regarding the coronavirus; see here and here. That latter example is particularly bad because it involved a reporter with an undisclosed conflict of interest. But the scientist-as-hero narrative […]
Statistical controversy on estimating racial bias in the criminal justice system
1. Background A bunch of people have asked me to comment on these two research articles: Administrative Records Mask Racially Biased Policing, by Dean Knox, Will Lowe, and Jonathan Mummolo: Researchers often lack the necessary data to credibly estimate racial discrimination in policing. In particular, police administrative records lack information on civilians police observe but […]
New England Journal of Medicine engages in typical academic corporate ass-covering behavior
James Watson (not the racist dude who, in 1998, said that a cancer cure was coming in 2 years) writes: About a month ago, when the infamous Lancet hydroxychloroquine/chloroquine paper was still “real science” (i.e. in the official scientific record), we decided to put extra pressure on the authors by writing an open letter to […]
Who were the business superstars of the 1970s?
Last month, we said: Who are today’s heroes? Not writers or even musicians? No, our pantheon of culture heroes are: rich men, athletes, some movie and TV stars, a few politicians, some offbeat intellectuals like Nate Silver and Nassim Taleb . . . I guess I should also add social media stars like whoever is […]
This one quick trick will allow you to become a star forecaster
Jonathan Falk points us to this wonderful post by Dario Perkins. It’s all worth a read, but, following Falk, I want to emphasize this beautiful piece of advice, which is #5 on their list of 10 items: How to get attention: If you want to get famous for making big non-consensus calls, without the danger […]
“Why do the results of immigrant students depend so much on their country of origin and so little on their country of destination?”
Aleks points us to this article from 2011 by Julio Carabaña. Carabaña’s article has three parts. First is a methodological point that much can be learned from a cross-national study that has data at the level of individual students, as compared to the usual “various origins-one destination” design. Second is the empirical claim, based on […]