Andrew Gelman

Political scientists have a pretty clear understanding that we our decisions are influenced in many ways. Just ‘cos something runs in the family, it doesn’t mean it’s genetic. Twin studies etc. I became aware of the distinctions several years ago when teaching a class on left-handedness. According to the statistics we saw, identical twins do […]

Around these parts we see a continuing flow of unusual claims supported by some statistical evidence. The claims are varyingly plausible a priori. Some examples which I’ve discussed on the sister blog: – Obesity is contagious – People’s names affect where they live, what jobs they take, etc. – Beautiful people are more likely to […]

William Glaberson reports that judges in New York feel they’re underpaid: New York judges have not had a raise in 12 years, making the state one of the more extreme examples of a growing pay gap nationally between judges and other professionals, including partners at top law firms, who can earn 10 times the salary […]

The following book review appeared in the New Yorker recently: I don’t know much about Brooklyn and I haven’t seen the book in question but I think the reviewer is making a classic statistical error in the last sentence above. Various people bought houses in these Brooklyn neighborhoods: some of these people were white, some […]

Yesterday I pointed to a quote from Israeli leader Shimon Peres, who expressed skepticism about foreign aid (although perhaps, according to commenters, his problem is only with non-military aid). I noticed another odd thing about Peres’s remarks. Peres said, “Giving is problematic. We take money from poor people in rich countries and give it to […]

Alex Tabarrok writes: Shimon Peres gave a press conference . . . When asked about foreign aid, specifically foreign aid to some Arab regimes he had this to say (again a paraphrase from my notes, the clever lines are his, the order may have changed somewhat and this is incomplete). Look, the West can’t help […]

Daniel Drezner posts some reflections by political scientist Erik Gartzke on the irrelevance of political science to policy: We really want to be “useful.” I [Gartzke] know of no other discipline that is so angst-ridden about mattering, even those that don’t matter in any concrete, “real world” sense. Obviously, what makes us different from poets, […]

Gary King writes: This article in the Washington Post quotes an intelligence official that “The chance of a false positive from the DNA testing [that it was bin Laden] is “approximately one in 11.8 quadrillion.” I think the people in this field haven’t the slightest idea what 11 quadrillion really means or what the claim […]

Social scientists often write papers where at some point they pivot from a well-founded but narrow claim to a broad conclusion that is unsupported by theory or data. That pivot is called “story time.” An economist offers a theoretical model explaining how it works. Ole Rogeberg writes: Here`s a blogpost regarding a new paper (embellished […]

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler are famous for finding that obesity is contagious. Their claims, which have been received with both respect and skepticism (perhaps we need a new word for this: “respecticism”?) are based on analysis of data from the Framingham heart study, a large longitudinal public-health study that happened to have some social […]