I don’t think I have much of a chance here, not because of the judging—I’d trust Brooks and Paxman to recognize good writing—but because the competition includes some heavy hitters, including Dan Davies with a meta-blog-post called The Verjus Manifesto, Sara Paretsky on The Detective As Speech, and Charles Pierce with . . . well, it almost doesn’t matter what, since anything by Charles Pierce is gonna be good. Hey—isn’t it cheating to include a professional writer on this list? It would be like Robin Williams coming on to the Gong Show to win a quick $516.32.
Other notable items on the list include Peter McCleery’s gimmicky-but-well-executed Thank You For Calling Mamet’s Appliance Centre and Evan Ratliff’s grabbily-titled-but-disappointing My Wife Found My Email In The Ashley Madison Database. (Spoiler: it was someone else who used his email address.)
Also a post by blog favorite Scott Adams. Not about Charlie Sheen, though.
Unfortunately it’s hard to quickly get a sense of all hundred articles cos you have to click through to 10 separate pages.
My own article on the list is a post from January on Psychology And Behavioural Economics, which begins stirringly:
I’ve been coming across these issues from several different directions lately, and I wanted to get the basic idea down without killing myself in the writing of it. So consider this a sketchy first draft.
Charles Pierce, it ain’t. Seriously, though, I appreciate being appreciated, and I appreciate that they’ll consider something that’s exploratory and bloggy, that’s not so polished. I like The Browser; they published two 5books interviews with me and one with my sister.
Top 10 vote getters get to be judged by David Brooks! You can vote here.
I wouldn’t trust Brooks to know good writing if it bit him on the foot. Paxman, though, always reminds me of this episode of this amazing show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOmB6go3kXg
Anyway, congrats!
I wish they would have linked the articles at the voting page. I remember reading most of the articles that are nominated from blogs I follow, but there are quite a few in there that seem really interesting.
And yes, congratulations on the nomination!
Totally unrelated but could not resist:
From an observational study that I presume freely mined the usual data sets:
– “Association of Coffee Consumption with Total and Cause-specific Mortality in Three Large Prospective Cohorts,” Ming Ding, Ambika Satija, Shilpa N. Bhupathiraju, Yang Hu, Qi Sun, Walter Willett, Rob M. van Dam, Frank B. Hu, Circulation, online November 16, 2015. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/moderate-coffee-drinking-may-lower-risk-of-premature-death/
To
– “Yippee! It’s Official: Coffee Will Make You Live Longer” http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/health/551066/coffee-is-good-for-you-health-benefits.html
Another Day, Another Scientific Discovery!
PS
How many people here would say 3-5 coffees a day is “moderate consumption”?
I reflexively rolled my eyes when I heard this mentioned on NPR this morning. Looking into it more now, I see they had a longer discussion including an interview of one of the authors this evening (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/11/16/456191657/drink-to-your-health-study-links-daily-coffee-habit-to-longevity). Much of it actually has appropriate cautions in interpretations, but the very end goes:
[interviewer] “As you point out, the participants in these studies are about 95 percent white, largely middle-class and well-educated. Can you extrapolate to other populations?”
[interviewee] “Yes, I’m quite sure these findings would apply to other populations. This is a biological relationship. And we basically have a common biology.”
Uh … Where’s the evidence?
We share the same biology. Regardless of ideology.
Wait—you’re not taking Sting as a reputable scientific reference?
Andrew,
I’m not following any of your two comments here.
Martha:
I have not had a chance to listen to the podcast but I am likely to remain unconvinced.
The problem is not that it is an observational study so much as the degrees of freedom involved. I suspect the study was not pre-registered, and with reams of data and variables it is easy to delude oneself.
In fact, I hope someone at MIT’s Media Lab reads this and does a little project: The Nutrition Research Bot:
1. Program a bot to run regressions on these data sets until it finds food items that have a statistically significant impact on some health outcome.
2. Generates a paper (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/)
3. Send it to predatory journals for immediate publication (http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102)
4. Tweet about it (a twitterbot https://github.com/roblanf/phypapers)
I suspect it could do this process at least 10 times a day. Now wouldn’t that be a “productive” bot…
Fernando:
Your proposed bot is a more sophisticated variation on Jerry Dallal’s web simulation of multiple testing (http://www.jerrydallal.com/LHSP/multtest.htm), which I find useful in convincing people that multiple testing can lead one down the primrose path.
Nice! But note the primrose path may include tenure, promotions, and the respect of your colleagues, so really the incentive to get things right places undue strain on virtue and ethics.
> How many people here would say 3-5 coffees a day is “moderate consumption”?
I peaked at 10+ cups a day sophomore year of college. Was taking too many classes. I needed it to stay awake. The first three cups were pleasurable. The tenth one?… No so much. By the end of the semester I was falling asleep at my desk twitching. That and my rapidly-dissolving stomach lining convinced me to lighten up on the credits thereafter. (I have three cups a day now.)
It’s a shame one of Pierce’s Moral Hazard stories wasn’t nominated.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a20246/david-brooks-opportunity-coalition-013114/
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21827/moral-hazard-returns-with-a-tale/
Mark:
It’s supposed to just be for writing on blogs and other such outlets. I guess Grantland falls in this category but Esquire doesn’t.
Let us just cross our fingers and hope that Brooks doesn’t use google or twitter.
They should have given the opportunity to vote for more than 1 entry. Selecting only 1 out of 100 nominations doesn’t make sense. Also, what Hasdrubal said. I am capable of posting into Google any entry I want, but that’s not how it should be done.
I want David Brooks to pick Andrew’s blogpost for the prize just to see the air thick with cognitive dissonance.