Last year I wrote a post, “Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible” . . . but I’m still guessing that the effects are being overestimated:. Since then, Vincent Bagilet and Léo Zabrocki-Hallak wrote an article, Why Some Acute Health … Continue reading
In the replication crisis in science, replications have often been performed of controversial studies on silly topics such as embodied cognition, extra-sensory perception, and power pose. We’ve been talking recently about replication being something we do for high-quality studies on … Continue reading
Don MacLeod writes: Perhaps you know this study which is being taken at face value in all the secondary reports: “Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals.” It’s surely alarming, but the reported effect of air pollution seems … Continue reading
Avery writes: There is a follow up paper for the paper “Evidence on the impact of sustained exposure to air pollution on life expectancy from China’s Huai River policy” [by Yuyu Chen, Avraham Ebenstein, Michael Greenstone, and Hongbin Li] which … Continue reading
In a post entitled, “Why the New Pollution Literature is Credible,” Alex Tabarrok writes: My recent post, Air Pollution Reduces Health and Wealth drew some pushback in the comments, some justified, some not, on whether the results of these studies … Continue reading
In a news article on Vox, entitled “Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits,” Matthew Yglesias writes: An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles … Continue reading
From this Washington Post article: But . . . wait a second. The University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute . . . what exactly is that? Let’s do a google, then we get to the relevant page. I’m concerned because … Continue reading
Gur Huberman writes on the recent fraud in experiments in polisci: This comment is a reaction to the little of the discussion which I [Gur] followed, mostly in the NYTimes. What I didn’t see anybody say is that the system … Continue reading
Someone pointed me to this post from Jonatan Pallesen: Frequently, when I [Pallesen] look into a discussed scientific paper, I find out that it is astonishingly bad. • I looked into Claudine Gay’s 2001 paper to check a specific thing, … Continue reading
Nick Brown pointed me to a new paper, “The Impact of Incidental Environmental Factors on Vote Choice: Wind Speed is Related to More Prevention-Focused Voting,” to which his reaction was, “It makes himmicanes look plausible.” Indeed, one of the authors … Continue reading
A few years ago we reviewed “Mostly Harmless Econometrics,” by Josh Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. And now we have another friendly introduction to causal inference by an economist, presented as a readable paperback book with a fun title. I’m speaking … Continue reading
1. Meta-story Someone pointed me to a news report of a statistics-based research claim and asked me what I thought of it. I read through the press summary and the underlying research paper. At this point, it’s natural to anticipate … Continue reading
Last year we posted 635 entries on this blog. Above is a histogram of the number of comments on each of the posts. The bars are each of width 5, except that I made a special bar just for the … Continue reading
This one’s buggin me. We’re in a situation now with forking paths in applied-statistics-being-done-by-economists where we were, about ten years ago, in applied-statistics-being-done-by-psychologists. (I was going to use the terms “econometrics” and “psychometrics” here, but that’s not quite right, because … Continue reading
Here goes: Smoothness, or lack thereof, in MRP estimates over time Open forensic science, and some general comments on the problems of legalistic thinking when discussing open science Votes vs. $ Of book reviews and selection bias This graduate student … Continue reading
As Ira Glass says, today we have a theme and some variations on this theme. Statistical nitpickers: Do they cause more harm than good? I’d like to think we cause more good than harm, but today I want to consider … Continue reading
As the above image from Diana Senechal illustrates, a lot can happen near a discontinuity boundary. Here’s a more disturbing picture, which comes from a recent research article, “The Bright Side of Unionization: The Case of Stock Price Crash Risk,” … Continue reading
OK, this is what we’ve got for you: “The Book of Why” by Pearl and Mackenzie Reproducibility and Stan MRP (multilevel regression and poststratification; Mister P): Clearing up misunderstandings about Becker on Bohm on the important role of stories in … Continue reading
“There’s the part you’ve braced yourself against, and then there’s the other part” – The Mountain Goats My favourite genre of movie is Nicole Kidman in a questionable wig. (Part of the sub-genre founded by Sarah Paulson, who is the … Continue reading
Pierre Jacob, Lawrence Murray, Chris Holmes, Christian Robert write: In modern applications, statisticians are faced with integrating heterogeneous data modalities relevant for an inference, prediction, or decision problem. In such circumstances, it is convenient to use a graphical model to … Continue reading