Search this site
Matching entries from Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Damn!
I learned from a completely reliable source that the letter to the editor I published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology was largely in error. I have to admire the thousands of anonymous Wikipedians who catch the mistakes of poseurs...
Le casse-tête des petits effets
Que penser de ces affirmations insolites parues récemment dans des revues scientifiques sérieuses? Par exemple: «Les ingénieurs ont plus de garçons, les infirmières ont plus de filles », « Les hommes violents ont plus de garçons», ou encore « Les...
Multiple Comparisons in Linear Regression
Hamdan Yousuf writes: I was reading your Kanazawa letter to the editor and I was interested in your discussion of multiple comparisons. This might be an elementary issue but I don't quite understand when the issue of multiple comparisons arises,...
The statistician over your shoulder
Xiao-Li wrote an article on his experiences putting together a statistics course for non-statistics students at Harvard. Xiao-Li asked for any comments, so I'm giving some right here: I think the ideas in the article are excellent. The challenges of...
This is just sad
Daniel Lakeland writes: You may be astounded that people are still reporting 26% more probability to have daughters than sons, and then extrapolating this to decide that evolution is strongly favoring beautiful women... Or considering the degree of innumeracy in...
Of Beauty, Sex, and Power
Our article has appeared in The American Scientist. (Here's a link to the full article; hit control-plus to make the font more readable.) I highly recommend it for your introductory (or advanced) statistics classes. We start with a silly story...
Just when I thought I was out . . . they pull me back in . . . part 2
Darryl Caldwell writes: I enjoyed your response to Satoshi Kanazawa's statistical data on sex ratios. I have a quick question for you. Did he respond? How was his response? My reply: I sent him an email but he did not...
The score
Occasionally I post comments here on other people's books or articles, and sometimes I email the authors to get their feedback. Here's the score: Responded: John Clute Richard Florida Malcolm Gladwell Sander Greenland Daniel Gross Mickey Kaus Paul Krugman Andrew...
Radford Neal's blog
Radford's a leading researcher in statistical computing. He started a new blog. Radford writes: Many of my technical posts will point out flaws in research, methods, and tools that are commonly used. Such negative comments are essential to the scientific...
Men, women, and politics
Via Craig Newmark, I saw a column by John Lott summarizing his 1999 paper with Lawrence Kenny, "Did women's suffrage change the size and scope of government?" Lott and Kenny conclude Yes, by comparing the spending and revenue patterns of...
The Fenimore Cooper of sociobiology
Oddly enough, I've received two unrelated emails attaching articles shooting down hypotheses of the notorious Satoshi Kanazawa: a paper by Kevin Denny in the Journal of Theoretical Biology: Recently Kanazawa (2005) proposed a generalization of the Trivers–Willard hypothesis which states...
The most beautiful people in the world . . . and a request for a favor (see the very bottom of this entry)
Ralph Blair sent this in. It's so horrible that I have to put it in the continuation part of the blog entry. I recommend you all stop reading right here. Stop . . . It's not too late!!!!!!!!!!!...
Kanazawarama
Thomas Volscho writes: David Weakliem mentioned your blog posting on one of Kanazawa's papers and its methodological shortcomings. I wrote a critique of one of his papers for The Sociological Quarterly and the editor gave him a chance to respond...
How should unproven findings be publicized?
A year or so ago I heard about a couple of papers by Satoshi Kanazawa on "Engineers have more sons, nurses have more daughters" and "Beautiful parents have more daughters." The titles surprised me, because in my acquaintance with such...
Blog personalities
Seth and I are both pretty aggressive conversationalists in person. But on the web, we're much different. I have an equanimous, mellow blog personality and generally try to see both sides of an issue. Seth is more of a tough...
Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan"
OK, I finished reading it and transcribing my thoughts. They're the equivalent of about 20 blog entries (or one long unpublishable article) but it seemed more convenient to just put them in one place. As I noted earlier, reading the...
Problems in a study of girl and boy births, leading to a point about the virtues of collaboration
I was asked by a reporter to comment on a paper by Satoshi Kanazawa, "Beautiful parents have more daughters," which is scheduled to appear in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. As I have already discussed, Kanazawa's earlier papers ("Engineers have...
Is this blog too critical of innovative research?
Andrew Oswald (author of the paper that found that parents of daughters are further to the left, politically, than parents of sons) writes, I read your post on Kanazawa. I don't know whether his paper is correct, but I wanted...
Amusing example of the fallacy of controlling for an intermediate outcome, or, the tyranny of statistical methodology and how it can lead even well-intentioned sociobiologists astray
I'm sorry to see that the Journal of Theoretical Biology published an article with the fallacy of controlling for an intermediate outcome. Or maybe I'm happy to see it because it's a great example for my classes. The paper is...
Feed Subscription
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to a feed of all future entries matching 'kanazawa'. [What is this?]
