As a data analyst and a scientist, Fisher > Neyman, no question. But as a theorist, Fisher came up with ideas that worked just fine in his applications but can fall apart when people try to apply them too generally. Here’s an example that recently came up. Deborah Mayo pointed me to a comment by [...]The post In which I side with Neyman over Fisher appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…
Every once in awhile I get a question that I can directly answer from my published research. When that happens it makes me so happy. Here’s an example. Patrick Lam wrote, Suppose one develops a Bayesian model to estimate a parameter theta. Now suppose one wants to evaluate the model via simulation by generating fake [...]The post Validation of Software for Bayesian Models Using Posterior Quantiles appeared first on Statistical…
I’ve been blogging a lot lately about plagiarism (sorry, Bob!), and one thing that’s been bugging me is, why does it bother me so much. Part of the story is simple: much of my reputation comes from the words I write, so I bristle at any attempt to devalue words. I feel the same way [...]The post To Throw Away Data: Plagiarism as a Statistical Crime appeared first on Statistical…
The end of Michelle Rhee. The relevance of statisticians to researchers in different fields of social science. Regression discontinuity. Free expression vs. not wanting to make anyone personally uncomfortable. Political coalitions are diverse (and there’s no use pretending otherwise). According to David Brooks, staying out of jail is a conservative value. I’ve heard of the [...]The post Recently in the sister blog appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…
Frontiers of Science is a course offered as part of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum. The course is controversial, with some people praising its overview of several areas of science, and others feeling that a more traditional set of introductory science courses would do the job better. Last month, the faculty in charge of the course [...]The post Evaluating Columbia University’s Frontiers of Science course appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
The other day we discussed that paper on ovulation and voting (you may recall that the authors reported a scattered bunch of comparisons, significance tests, and p-values, and I recommended that they would’ve done better to simply report complete summaries of their data, so that readers could see the comparisons of interest in full context), [...]The post What happened that the journal Psychological Science published a paper with no identifiable…
This isn’t quite right—poetry, too, can be in paragraph form (see Auden, for example, or Frost, or lots of other examples)—but Basbøll is on to something here. I’m reminded of Nicholson Baker’s hilarious “From the I...
Hamdan Azhar writes: I came across this graphic of vaccine-attributed decreases in mortality and was curious if you found it as unattractive and unintuitive as I did. Hope all is well with you! My reply: All’s well with me. And yes, that’s one horrible graph. It has all the problems with a bad infographic with [...]The post uuuuuuuuuuuuugly appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Lee Sechrest sends along this article by Brian Haig and writes that it “presents what seems to me a useful perspective on much of what scientists/statisticians do and how science works, at least in the fields in which I work.” Here’s Haig’s abstract: A broad theory of scientific method is sketched that has particular relevance [...]The post Where do theories come from? appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…
I received two emails yesterday on related topics. First, Stephen Olivier pointed me to this post by Daniel Lakens, who wrote the following open call to statisticians: You would think that if you are passionate about statistics, then you want to help people to calculate them correctly in any way you can. . . . [...]The post How can statisticians help psychologists do their research better? appeared first on Statistical…
