It’s the eternal question . . . what do you want, if given these three options: (a) 54 Jamaican beef patties. (b) 1/216 of a conference featuring some mixture of active and washed-up business executives, academics, politicians, and hangers-on. (c) A soggy burger, sad-looking fries, and a quart of airport whisky. The ideal would be to put it all together: 54 Jamaican beef patties at the airport, waiting to your flight to the conference to meet Grover Norquist’s rabbi. Who probably has a lot to say about the ills of modern consumerism. I’d pay extra for airport celery if that’s what it took, but ..read more

Emily Tanner-Smith writes: Remote/Hybrid Postdoc Opportunity—join us as a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice in the College of Education at the University of Oregon! The HEDCO Institute specializes in the conduct of evidence syntheses that meet the immediate decision-making demands of local, state, and national school leaders. Our work is carried out by a team of faculty and staff who work collaboratively with affiliated faculty at the UO and an external advisory board. The HEDCO Institute also provides research and outreach training and exper ..read more

Substack. Twitter. Bluesky. Mastodon. RSS. The blog itself. Also, our old posts are spooling at StatRetro every three hours starting with our very first post from 2004. The blog’s in all these places because people told me they were having difficulty staying informed about the new posts. So, lots of places for you to find these ..read more

After writing this post, I was thinking that my superpower as a researcher is my willingness to admit I’m wrong, which gives me many opportunities to learn and do better (see for example here or here). My other superpower is my capacity to be upset, which has often led me to think deeper about statistical questions (for example here). That’s all fine, but then it struck me that, whenever people talk about their “superpower,” they always seem to talk about qualities that just about anyone could have. For example, “My superpower is my ability to listen to people,” or “My superpower is that I alw ..read more

Fri 26 Apr, 10am in Shriver Hall Boardroom and 2pm in Hodson Hall 213 (see also here): Storytelling and Scientific Understanding Andrew Gelman and Thomas Basbøll Storytelling is central to science, not just as a tool for broadcasting scientific findings to the outside world, but also as a way that we as scientists understand and evaluate theories. We argue that, for this purpose, a story should be anomalous and immutable; that is, it should be surprising, representing some aspect of reality that is not well explained by existing models of the world, and have details that stand up to scrutiny ..read more

Sean Manning points to this remark from Matthew “not the musician” White: I [White] am sometimes embarrassed by where I have been forced to find my statistics … Often, the only place to find numbers is in a newspaper article, almanac, chronicle or encyclopedia which needs to summarize major events into a few short sentences or into one scary number, and occasionally I get the feeling that some writers use numbers as pure rhetorical flourishes. To them, “over a million” does not mean “>106”; it’s just synonymous with “a lot”. White was sooooo close to picking up on the concept of decorativ ..read more

In social science, we’ll study some topic, then move on to the next thing. For example, Yotam and I did this project on social penumbras and political attitudes, we designed a study, collected data, analyzed the data, wrote it up, eventually it was published—the whole thing took years! and we were very happy with the results—and then we moved on. The idea is that other people will pick up the string. There were lots of little concerns, issues of measurement, causal identification, generalization, etc., and we discussed these in our paper, again hoping that these will be useful leads to furthe ..read more

James Heathers reports on the article, “Contagion or restitution? When bad apples can motivate ethical behavior,” by Gino, Gu, and Zhong (2009): There is some sentiment data reported in Experiment 3, which seems to be reported in whole units. They also indicated how guilty they would feel about the behavior of the person who took all the money along with some unrelated emotional measures (1 = not at all, 5 = very much)… participants in the in-group selfish condition felt more guilty (M = 4.61, SD = 1.64) about the person’s selfish behavior than the participants in the out-group selfish condi ..read more

I came across this post from 2011, “Infovis, infographics, and data visualization: Where I’m coming from, and where I’d like to go,” and it seemed to make sense to reassess where we are now, 12 years later. From 2011: I majored in physics in college and I worked in a couple of research labs during the summer. Physicists graph everything. I did most of my plotting on graph paper–this continued through my second year of grad school–and became expert at putting points at 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, and 4/5 between the x and y grid lines. In grad school in statistics, I continued my physics habits and graphed ..read more

I’m coding up a new adaptive sampler in Python, which is super exciting (the basic methodology is due to Nawaf Bou-Rabee and Tore Kleppe). Luckily for me, another great colleague, Edward Roualdes, has been keeping me on the straight and narrow by suggesting stronger tests and pointing out actual bugs in the repository (we’ll open access it when we put the arXiv paper up—hopefully by the end of the month). There are a huge number of potential fencepost (off by one), log-vs-exponential, positive-vs-negative, numerator-vs-denominator, and related errors to make in this kind of thing. For example ..read more