Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/Chicago. Somehow it's impossible that anybody in South Dakota or Missouri could ever do anything worthwile, I wonder how that's possible. The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer.
So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
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Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#22It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.
> It's not clear what technical content this post has.
Indeed. The post is a big exercise in strawmanning (and of course ad hominem but I am willing to forgive it because it adds entertainment value). Andrew Gelman (a well-known statistics expert) dunks on some guy because he dared to defend a shitty graphic and "made a statistical error". Which is kind of unfair, because he didn't do any statistics. Of course when our brains see some curves they can't resist the temptation to do some statistics on their own, but bad dataviz is a different sin than bad statistics and should be treated as such.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#23> which is the general level of mediocrity, even at the top levels of academia This is not unique to academia. Our entire society has gradually degenerated over the last few decades for a number of constructively interfering reasons: 1. We told two+ generations of children that everyone was capable of anything, gave them all awards after every "competition", and that kind of upbringing makes it difficult to recognize…
What is with this ridiculous fixation people have on participation trophies? I'm serious, where is this idea coming from? Was it an object of moral concern in the media before I was old enough to remember or something? Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.
>Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.
It's not a single stupid ribbon. It's growing up in a society where literally every competition results in everyone winning. Predicting performance (i.e. evaluating merit) is a skill that requires development, yet when you reward everyone equally regardless of success or failure you train that skill on noise. How do you expect children to learn to recognize when people are or are not skilled when you imply that skills don't matter because everyone wins anyway? Instead you raise them to believe that skills don't matter.
What happens when these children become adults after a lifetime of being taught that everyone is a winner, regardless of performance? Cognitive dissonance and a sense of entitlement, because there will always be true winners and losers in a world of scarce resources.
Children need to experience failure. Just like they need to experience pain and a multitude of other negative emotions that our modern society increasingly attempts to shield them from. Otherwise you raise a generation of childminded adults who fail to differentiate between charisma and merit, and all of society suffers.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#24s/academia/every career/g
Does the s/ here mean substitute?
What is the /g in this context?
Is this the regular expression flag for global search?
Sorry, not a programmer just a dumb tradie.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#25It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.
I think there's actually two things going on here. There's what this post is talking about, which is a general lack of understanding of statistics, which is likely true and correct, and likely for both reasons that are explored here. Then there's the reason to actually even talk about this specific instance, which is that there is a complete lack of operating on the assumption of good faith and clarifying intent befo…
Well, if you want to express nuance, Twitter might not be the medium for you...
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#26Very difficult to understand what's going here, through the snark, personal abuse, name calling, and political bias. Everyone's trying to communicate through increasingly scathing Tweets and declaring each time that the previous Tweet is yet another new low point. Not a useful way for anyone to get a point across. Everyone should be embarrassed.
No, I don't think that's right. That was my initial impression also, but what's going on is that people are ridiculing the academic advisor who is working at the Council of Economic Advisors at the Whitehouse because his agency (a) released a tweet about Covid with childishly absurd mistakes in it and then (b) he vigorously defended it in a follow-up tweet.
The problem they are ridiculing is mainly that an observed time series that is going up and down with no clear trend is "modeled" with a polynomial that necessarily goes down, and that the tweet claims there is some value in the fitted polynomial.
Secondarily, the fact that the polynomial is described as cubic, when it appears to be quadratic.
Added together it makes it extremely explicitly clear that at the highest levels of American government, even in situations with the involvement of elite academic advisors, the actual technical content is utterly incompetent; childish; totally illiterate from a statistical point of view; bad even at high school.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#27Basically: smoothing data != model forecast It's a fair point. But what should have a discussion turned into playground name calling.
No, that's what I thought at first, but that's not it. See my post elsewhere in this thread.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#28It's not clear what technical content this post has. A cubic polynomial vs time would be a terrible idea, but the dashed and/or dotted red line (that people seem upset about) is obviously not a cubic polynomial vs time. At that point I run out of guesses about exactly what's being said by anybody.
Um, yes. The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic. Nobody's models seem to be predicting well. Nor is the source data for anything but deaths very good. This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno.
> The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic.
I'm curious how you concluded this. Can you (or anyone) recommend a reasoned evaluation of the existing models? We've got a few months of hindsight now and I'm curious hear what any reputable data scientist might have to say.
I see criticism of the models online (in op-eds and social media), but the criticisms are usually agenda driven and opaque on technical details, which isn't particularly helpful.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#29Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#30Doesn't this apply to almost any large bureaucratic organization or system?