Maybe you should write a book for non-scientists on how to navigate criticism and debate. It's clearly easy for skeptically-minded people to uncritically embrace bad critiques.
I wonder about that dynamic too. The status account by itself isn't satisfying to me. It's not just tempting to embrace contrarian gurus. It's tempting to guru-ize people who have "nullius in verba" tattooed on their foreheads. There's something more fundamental going on to do with how we relate to uncertainty.
Psudeocritics make the jobs of the TRUE heroes (people who make fun of professionals for sharing horrible graphs on Twitter) so much harder. How am I supposed to make fun of the dude who made a market concentration v inflation graph where there were so many industries at 100% that the 100% mark was just a contiguous blue line when other people are posting dumb critiques? Think of the good-faith trolls you monsters!
One interesting exercise is to figure out how many datapoints we can add to / remove from the chart for the weak correlation between variables to be zero or in the opposite direction.
A small correlation might be very meaningful in a situation where we expect year-over-year stability. People have fewer children now than they used to. If you did a scatterplot of the fifty states over a ten year period it wouldn't look like much change at all. Yet we know that over time - say, over fifty years - it's a very big deal indeed. When even small changes have large consequences, it adds up.
the funny thing is that the change in cooperation from start to finish was large enough relative to the standard error that you can break it into two non-overlapping periods in which you can say with over 95% confidence that an increase occurred within each period.
"it was quote-tweeted by one of the biggest pseudocritics of them all, N.N. Taleb"
I have very little knowledge of statistics and have been convinced by Taleb's tweets in the past. Could you explain (or maybe even write a new post!) what you disagree with Taleb about?
One of the themes of Taleb’s writing has to do with the superiority of practice to theory. Lots of his tweeting involves him trashing things on theoretical grounds even if they work in practice. He blocks you if you point this out.
A lot of his stuff is interesting and thought provoking but you’ll think more highly of him if you don’t follow him on Twitter.
I was thinking today how Twitter completely shattered my naive view of academics and learned people being distinguished gentleman/ladies who disagree and spar using deplomatic language....Nope!! They will easily shit-sling, troll and act in a juvenile manner just as much as the next person 😂
I’m of the opinion that no university should be on Twitter or allow their academics to be on there in ANY professional academic capacity. The medium is designed to turn otherwise polite people into assholes. Academics don’t need ANY encouragement in that department.
Maybe you should write a book for non-scientists on how to navigate criticism and debate. It's clearly easy for skeptically-minded people to uncritically embrace bad critiques.
Yes, it's higher status to be gullible about these kind of critiques than to be open minded about the original thesis that they attack.
I wonder about that dynamic too. The status account by itself isn't satisfying to me. It's not just tempting to embrace contrarian gurus. It's tempting to guru-ize people who have "nullius in verba" tattooed on their foreheads. There's something more fundamental going on to do with how we relate to uncertainty.
Psudeocritics make the jobs of the TRUE heroes (people who make fun of professionals for sharing horrible graphs on Twitter) so much harder. How am I supposed to make fun of the dude who made a market concentration v inflation graph where there were so many industries at 100% that the 100% mark was just a contiguous blue line when other people are posting dumb critiques? Think of the good-faith trolls you monsters!
Hahaha, EXCELLENT point! There are so many shit graphs out there - let's save our ire for them!
One interesting exercise is to figure out how many datapoints we can add to / remove from the chart for the weak correlation between variables to be zero or in the opposite direction.
A small correlation might be very meaningful in a situation where we expect year-over-year stability. People have fewer children now than they used to. If you did a scatterplot of the fifty states over a ten year period it wouldn't look like much change at all. Yet we know that over time - say, over fifty years - it's a very big deal indeed. When even small changes have large consequences, it adds up.
the funny thing is that the change in cooperation from start to finish was large enough relative to the standard error that you can break it into two non-overlapping periods in which you can say with over 95% confidence that an increase occurred within each period.
"it was quote-tweeted by one of the biggest pseudocritics of them all, N.N. Taleb"
I have very little knowledge of statistics and have been convinced by Taleb's tweets in the past. Could you explain (or maybe even write a new post!) what you disagree with Taleb about?
One of the themes of Taleb’s writing has to do with the superiority of practice to theory. Lots of his tweeting involves him trashing things on theoretical grounds even if they work in practice. He blocks you if you point this out.
A lot of his stuff is interesting and thought provoking but you’ll think more highly of him if you don’t follow him on Twitter.
That's true of most people, TBH. Twitter is hardly a place to see people at their best.
I was thinking today how Twitter completely shattered my naive view of academics and learned people being distinguished gentleman/ladies who disagree and spar using deplomatic language....Nope!! They will easily shit-sling, troll and act in a juvenile manner just as much as the next person 😂
I’m of the opinion that no university should be on Twitter or allow their academics to be on there in ANY professional academic capacity. The medium is designed to turn otherwise polite people into assholes. Academics don’t need ANY encouragement in that department.
This is one of the best takedowns (of anyone, not just Taleb) that I have ever read: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/nassim-taleb-on-iq/