Our story begins with this article by Sanjay Kaul and George Diamond: The randomized controlled clinical trial is the gold standard scientific method for the evaluation of diagnostic and treatment interventions. Such trials are cited frequently as the authoritative foundation...
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Posted by Andrew Gelman at 4:30 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Deep in a long discussion, Phil writes, in evident frustration: I don't like argument by innuendo. Say what you mean; how hard is it, for cryin' out loud? Actually, it is hard! I've spent years trying to write directly, and...
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Posted by Andrew Gelman at 12:57 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Kent Holsinger sends along this statistics discussion from a climate scientist. I don't really feel like going into the details on this one, except to note that this appears to be a discussion between two physicists about statistics. The blog...
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Posted by Andrew Gelman at 3:59 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I came across this news article by Sharon Begley: Mind Reading Is Now Possible: A computer can tell with 78 percent accuracy when someone is thinking about a hammer and not pliers. The article came out in 2008. I'm just...
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Posted by Andrew Gelman at 8:29 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Felix Salmon gives the story. I haven't read the research articles, but it's an interesting story. As Salmon frames the book, it's Freakonomics-the-book vs. Freakonomics-style empirical analysis. P.S. I'm assuming that both numbers above have been rounded to the nearest...
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Posted by Andrew Gelman at 12:18 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Jeremy Miles pointed me to this article by Leonhard Held with what might seem like an appealing brew of classical, Bayesian, and graphical statistics: P values are the most commonly used tool to measure evidence against a hypothesis. Several attempts...
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Posted by Andrew Gelman at 3:00 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Sanjay Srivastava writes: Below are the names of some psychological disorders. For each one, choose one of the following: A. This is under formal consideration to be included as a new disorder in the DSM-5. B. Somebody out there has...
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Posted by Andrew Gelman at 3:28 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Brendan Nyhan links to this hilariously bad graph from the Wall Street Journal: It's cute how they scale the black line to go right between the red and blue lines, huh? I'm not quite sure how $7.25 can be 39%...
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Posted by Andrew Gelman at 7:41 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Brendan Nyhan passes along an article by Don Green, Shang Ha, and John Bullock, entitled "Enough Already about 'Black Box' Experiments: Studying Mediation Is More Difficult than Most Scholars Suppose," which begins: The question of how causal effects are transmitted...
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Posted by Andrew Gelman at 11:59 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
