Peter DeScioli writes: I was wondering if you saw this paper about people reading Harry Potter and then disliking Trump, attached. It seems to fit the shark attack genre. In this case, the issue seems to be judging causation from multiple regression with observational data, assuming that control variables are enough to narrow down to […] The post Maybe this paper is a parody, maybe it’s a semibluff appeared first…
From last year: One could make the argument that power pose is innocuous, maybe beneficial in that it is a way of encouraging people to take charge of their lives. And this may be so. Even if power pose itself is meaningless, the larger “power pose” story could be a plus. Of course, if power […] The post “From that perspective, power pose lies outside science entirely, and to criticize…
From a blog comment a few years ago regarding an article by Robert Kosara: As Thomas and I discuss in our paper [When Do Stories Work? Evidence and Illustration in the Social Sciences], it is somewhat paradoxical that good stories tend to be anomalous, given that when it comes to statistical data, we generally want […] The post It is somewhat paradoxical that good stories tend to be anomalous, given…
I came across this site one day: The Westlake Review is a blog dedicated to doing a detailed review and analysis of every novel Donald Westlake published under his own name, as well as under a variety of pseudonyms. These reviews will reveal major plot elements, though they will not be full synopses. People who […] The post The Westlake Review appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social…
So. I read more by and about Irwin Shaw. I read Shaw’s end-of-career collection of short stories and his most successful novel, The Young Lions, and also the excellent biography by Michael Shnayerson. I also read Adam Begley’s recent biography of John Updike, which was also very good, and it made be sad that probably […] The post Irwin Shaw, John Updike, and Donald Trump appeared first on Statistical Modeling,…
In this post from a couple years ago I discussed the unsatisfying end of The Martian. At the time, I wrote: The ending is not terrible—at a technical level it’s somewhat satisfying (I’m not enough of a physicist to say more than that), but at the level of construction of a story arc, it didn’t […] The post An improved ending for The Martian appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal…
[cat picture] Christian Robert, Judith Rousseau, and I wrote: Several of the examples in [the book under review] represent solutions to problems that seem to us to be artificial or conventional tasks with no clear analogy to applied work. “They are artificial and are expressed in terms of a survey of 100 individuals expressing support […] The post Classical statisticians as Unitarians appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and…
I haven’t had much contact with the history department here at Columbia. A bunch of years ago I co-taught a course with Herb Klein and some others, and the material from that class went into my book co-edited with Jeronimo Cortina, A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences. More recently, I’ve had some conversations with […] The post From Whoops to Sorry: Columbia University history prof relives 1968 appeared first…
Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s a William James quote that could’ve been plucked right off the Algonquin Round Table: Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver. The post A quote from William James that could’ve ...
From a few years ago, some quotes from the classic psychologist that fit within the worldview of the classic sabermetrician: Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. A great many people think they are thinking […] The post A collection of quotes from William James that all could’ve come from…
