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Kansas aside, the red/blue divide is still striking. The "ecological fallacy" here is similar to Durkheim's (see Chance News 92 [http://test.causeweb.org/wiki/chance/index.php/Chance_News_92#Simpson.E2.80.99s_paradox_and_the_ecological_fallacy here] for more discussion), where he noted that the more Protestant the Prussian province, the larger the suicide rate--but it turns out that the suicides were actually committed by Catholics, not Protestants. The possible analogy here: in Democratic states it may be the Republicans who are frequenting pornography web sites. | Kansas aside, the red/blue divide is still striking. The "ecological fallacy" here is similar to Durkheim's (see Chance News 92 [http://test.causeweb.org/wiki/chance/index.php/Chance_News_92#Simpson.E2.80.99s_paradox_and_the_ecological_fallacy here] for more discussion), where he noted that the more Protestant the Prussian province, the larger the suicide rate--but it turns out that the suicides were actually committed by Catholics, not Protestants. The possible analogy here: in Democratic states it may be the Republicans who are frequenting pornography web sites. | ||
[http://andrewgelman.com/2014/05/24/buzzfeed-porn-kansas-results-cant-good/ More commentary] can be found on Andrew Gelman's blog | [http://andrewgelman.com/2014/05/24/buzzfeed-porn-kansas-results-cant-good/ More commentary] can be found on Andrew Gelman's blog. | ||
Submitted by Paul Alper | Submitted by Paul Alper | ||
Revision as of 01:48, 3 June 2014
Politics and porn (What's the matter with Kansas?)
Distrust your data
by Jacob Harris, opennews.org, 22 May 2014
Harris identifies 6 ways to make mistakes in reporting data:
- Sloppy proxieson
- Dichotomizing
- Correlation does not equal causation
- Ecological inference
- Geocoding
- Data naivete
His prime example is a story that was widely circulated via social media, featuring the following scatterplot
Kansas is a clear outlier. Harris credits a reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog for the following explanation of the geocoding problem:
What happened here was that a large percentage of IP addresses could not be resolved to an address any more specific than “USA.” When that address was geocoded, it returned a point in the centroid of the continental United States, which placed it in the state of—you guessed it—Kansas!
Kansas aside, the red/blue divide is still striking. The "ecological fallacy" here is similar to Durkheim's (see Chance News 92 here for more discussion), where he noted that the more Protestant the Prussian province, the larger the suicide rate--but it turns out that the suicides were actually committed by Catholics, not Protestants. The possible analogy here: in Democratic states it may be the Republicans who are frequenting pornography web sites.
More commentary can be found on Andrew Gelman's blog.
Submitted by Paul Alper