Chance News 93

Quotations

“The magic of statistics cannot create information when there is none.”

Howard Wainer in Uneducated Guesses, 2011, p. 133

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

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He [Stapel] viewed himself as giving his audience what they craved: 'structure, simplicity, a beautiful story.' Stapel glossed over experimental details, projecting the air of a thinker who has no patience for methods. The tone of his talks, he said, was 'Let’s not talk about the plumbing, the nuts and bolts — that’s for plumbers, for statisticians.'"

--Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, in The mind of a con man, New York Times, 26 April 2013

[Stapel is the disgraced Dutch academic who faked his data to show statistical significance].

Submitted by Paul Alper

Forsooth

Ignorance is bliss, or is it?

“I remember a few years ago looking at peer rankings of graduate departments and being delighted to discover that among statistics departments my own alma mater was in the top ten (although my trust in the process was tempered by the knowledge that, despite its lofty ranking, Princeton’s statistics department had been disbanded decades earlier.)”

Howard Wainer in Uneducated Guesses, 2011, p. 141

“As they do on many obscure policy issues, Americans polarize sharply along partisan lines when they learn that President Barack Obama supports a repeal of the 1975 Public Affairs Act. …. There's one striking problem here: The 1975 Public Affairs Act does not exist. …. In a series of surveys that polled national samples about similarly fictitious or otherwise unknown legislation, [pollsters] found 20 to 40 percent of Americans were willing to offer opinions on laws they have never heard of.”

“Beware: Survey Questions About Fictional Issues Still Get Answers”, HUFFPOST, April 12, 2013

“Most uses of the classical tools of statistics have been, are, and will be, made by those who know not what they do.”

John Tukey in “The Technical Tools of Statistics”, November1964

Submitted by Margaret Cibes

Justice flunks math

Thanks to Bob Griffin, who sent a link the following op/ed:

Justice flunks math, by Liela Schneps and Caolie Colmez, New York Times, 26 March 2013

This op/ed piece is a response to the recent developments in the case of Amanda Knox (Italy’s highest court overturns acquittal of Amanda Knox, NYT, 26 March 2013). In 2009, Knox and her ex-boyfriend were convicted in Italy for the murder of Knox's roommate. The twists and turns in her prosecution have been widely documented in the media. In 2011, an appeals court overturned the convictions. But now the Court of Cassation has ordered that the case be retried.

According to Schneps and Colmez, "The Court of Cassation has not yet publicly explained the motivations behind its ruling. But the appellate judge’s failure to understand probability may well play a role." A judge has refused to order a retest of a DNA sample, recovered in 2007 from a knife in Knox's apartment, that had been tentatively linked to the victim. They continue:

Whatever concerns the judge might have had regarding the reliability of DNA tests, he demonstrated a clear mathematical fallacy: assuming that repeating the test could tell us nothing about the reliability of the original results.

Imagine, for example, that you toss a coin and it lands on heads 8 or 9 times out of 10. You might suspect that the coin is biased. Now, suppose you then toss it another 10 times and again get 8 or 9 heads. Wouldn’t that add a lot to your conviction that something’s wrong with the coin? It should.

Schneps and Colmez have collaborated on a recent book Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom, which explores misapplications of statistics in criminal trials.

Correlation vs. causation tales

Here are two new recent stories that show that the need for constant vigilance in explaining that association is not causation.

Double majors produce dynamic thinkers, study finds.
by Dan Berrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 March 2013

Jeff Witmer sent this article to the Isolated Statisticians list, and also this link to the original study.

The Chronicle site requires a subscription, but Jeff provided the two revealing quotations that appear below. First the description of the findings:

• "Students who major in two fields are more apt than their single-majoring peers to think both integratively and creatively, according to a new study."

Of course, we should ask ourselves whether the increase in creativity was a result of double-majoring, or whether integrative thinkers are more likely to choose double-majors. As Jeff points out, this point was apparently lost on the Chronicle, which ironically followed up with this statement.

• "While the rate of double majors at the nation's colleges is 9 percent, it was 19 percent in the researchers' sample, reflecting the generally high caliber of students at elite institutions."

In another recent example, Paul Alper sent a link to these the following (and also a response from Andrew Gelman's blog):

Researchers finally replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and there are serious problems
by Mike Konczal, Next New Deal blog, 16 April 2013

Reinhart and Rogoff are economists whose writing about the relationship between economic growth and government debt have been frequently cited in the discussion over the US national debt (here is a link from the Wall Street Journal to the 2010 Reinhart-Rogoff paper, Growth in a time of debt). In his blog post, Konczal quotes Paul Ryan's Path to Prosperity budget as saying that Reinhart-Rogoff "found conclusive empirical evidence that [debt] exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth."

Not surprisingly, deficit hawks argue that increased spending has led to excessive debt, causing slower growth. But, as with the previous story, we should be asking whether the causality could go the other way: perhaps slower growth has driven up the debt by reducing government revenues. Probably debt and growth interact in a more complicated way than either of these simple explanations suggest. The point again is not to seize on an observed association as definitive proof for one's favored theory.

Now even more serious trouble has emerged. Other researchers trying to reproduce the analysis uncovered errors in the spreadsheet model Reinhart and Rogoff used to code their data. The mistake had the effect of excluding some high-debt countries that did not experience subpar growth (see The Excel depression by Paul Krugman, New York Times, 18 April 2013). There also appeared to be some selective omissions of high-debt years that did not fit the theory. When these problems are corrected, the famous 90 percent figure no longer stands out as a critical turning point. But of course this was the feature that drew so much attention to the model in the first place.

Paul Alper sent a link to Andrew Gelman's blogpost Memo to Reinhart and Rogoff: I think it’s best to admit your errors and go on from there (16 April 2013).

Submitted by Bill Peterson

Randomly funny

“These Amazon Products Are No Joke, But the Online Reviews Are”
The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2013

Apparently there are thousands of people submitting satirical reviews of books and other products to Amazon’s website.

This article’s opening focus was on reviews of RAND’s 600-page, 60-year-old paperback A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates. (See “A Million Random Digits” for a pdf or e-copy of the book, as well as RAND’s motivation for preparing the book.)

Here are two creative reviews:

“Almost perfect …. But with so many terrific random digits, it's a shame they didn't sort them, to make it easier to find the one you're looking for.”
“[T]he first thing I thought to myself after reading chapter one was, ‘Look out, Harry Potter!’”

The article also reported:

One Amazon reviewer panned a real-life copycat publication called "A Million Random Digits THE SEQUEL: with Perfectly Uniform Distribution." "Let's be honest, 4735942 is just a rehashed version of 64004382, and 32563233 is really nothing more than 97132654 with an accent."

And Amazon’s uranium ore sample product drew the review, "I purchased this product 4.47 billion years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty."

This article, including reviews of many other books and products, is a wonderful end-of-year read! The 59 comments are also interesting, as many discuss randomness and/or cite other sources of satirical reviews!

Submitted by Margaret Cibes