Torbjørn Skardhamar writes: I am a sociologist/criminologist working at Statistics Norway. As I am not a trained statistician, I find myself sometimes in need to check basic statistical concepts. Recently, I came across an article which I found a bit strange, but I needed to check up on my statistical understanding of a very basic [...]The post Using trends in R-squared to measure progress in criminology?? appeared first on Statistical…
In an email I sent to a colleague who’s writing about lasso and Bayesian regression for R users: The one thing you might want to add, to fit with your pragmatic perspective, is to point out that these different methods are optimal under different assumptions about the data. However, these assumptions are never true (even [...]The post Same old same old appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
Social science research has been getting pretty bad press recently, what with the Excel buccaneers who didn’t know how to handle data with different numbers of observations per country, and the psychologist who published dozens of papers based on fabricated data, and the Evilicious guy who wouldn’t let people review his data tapes, etc etc. [...]The post Against optimism about social science appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…
David Hogg pointed me to this post by Gary Marcus, reviewing this skeptics’ all-star issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science that features replication culture heroes Jelte Wicherts, Hal Pashler, Arina Bones, E. J. Wagenmakers, Gregory Francis, Hal Pashler, John Ioannidis, and Uri Simonsohn. I agree with pretty much everything Marcus has to say. In addition [...]
David Hogg pointed me to this post by Gary Marcus, reviewing this skeptics’ all-star issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science that features replication culture heroes Jelte Wicherts, Hal Pashler, Arina Bones, E. J. Wagenmakers, Gregory Francis, Hal Pashler, John Ioannidis, and Uri Simonsohn. I agree with pretty much everything Marcus has to say. In addition [...]The post Cleaning up science appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
We had some interesting comments on our recent reflections on Niall Ferguson’s ill-chosen remarks in which he attributed Keynes’s economic views (I don’t actually know exactly what Keyesianism is, but I think a key part is for the government to run surpluses during economic booms and deficits during recessions) to the Keynes being gay and [...]The post One more thought on Hoover historian Niall Ferguson’s thing about Keynes being gay…
History professor (or, as the news reports call him, “Harvard historian”) Niall Ferguson got in trouble when speaking at a conference of financial advisors. Tom Kostigen reports: Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, [...]The post Jesus historian Niall Ferguson and the improving standards of public discourse appeared first…
Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers have been inspired by the recent Reinhardt and Rogoff debacle to list “six ways to separate lies from statistics” in economics research: 1. “Focus on how robust a finding is, meaning that different ways of looking at the evidence point to the same conclusion.” 2. Don’t confuse statistical with practical [...]The post 7 ways to separate errors from statistics appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
I encourage you to check out our linked blogs. Here’s what they’re all about: Cognitive and Behavioral Science BPS Research Digest: I haven’t been following this one recently, but it has lots of good links, I should probably check it more often. There are a couple things that bother me, though. The blog is sponsored [...]The post The blogroll appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Doug Hartmann writes (link from Jay Livingston): Justice Antonin Scalia’s comment in the Supreme Court hearings on the U.S. law defining marriage that “there’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not.” Hartman argues that Scalia is [...]
