A moving average would make sense, but cubic fit? WTF? In epidemiology, is there a theoretical basis for death rates to follow any type of polynomial trend with time? If you measure say, drag force vs. airspeed at finite intervals, sure, use a second-order fit. Drag varies with the square of speed, theory predicts that relation. But there isn't such for death rates, is there?
So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
31–40 of 223 posts
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#32Very 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 t…
I came to the same realization, but it was unnecessarily difficult to see through all of the snark. If all parties had simply focused on the salient points of disgreement rather than snarking at each other, it could have been cleared up much more quickly. The GP is right; all sides should be embarrassed.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#33Economics 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/St…
You'd sort of have to distrust the ability of any economist who wasn't good at squeezing the most out of a compensation system.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#34It'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.
> 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.
What? The chart's creator said it was a cubic polynomial. Mr. Hassett said he had employed ‘just a canned function in Excel, a cubic polynomial.’”
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21250641/kevin-hassett-cubic-mo...
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#35Economics 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/St…
> The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer.
Was that sentence necessary? There are so many conspiracy theories about Epstein that its not clear what you are expressing here and I'm not sure I care to know.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#36I'm just going to comment on the graph, not the tweets. The graph shows three predictions from IHME.
One, the blue line, is a model from 3/27. It matches the data okay.
The second, the yellow line, is a model from 4/5. The agreement of this line is much worse, and the fact that the model did worse with more data is not promising.
The third, the teal line, is a model from 5/4. The data (black) ends at 5/4. So the agreement of the teal line with the black line is not a prediction at all.
The red line, a cubic fit, is totally irrelevant. By "cubic fit" I infer that they mean some kind of low-pass signal filter. Fitting a simple model like that to a complex time series without some motivation for why that model was chosen is the mathematical equivalent of treating tuberculosis with mercury.
My point is: it sure doesn't look like the models are doing a good job of predicting death rates. And that's just from the graph used to advertise them.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#37Economics 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/St…
> The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer. Was that sentence necessary? There are so many conspiracy theories about Epstein that its not clear what you are expressing here and I'm not sure I care to know.
I think it's meant to be read as, "rich, powerful, and totally undeserving of influence."
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Lol, I believe that. The problem is that these days it seems like the message either has to be only visible by friendlies, or reduced to the simplest and rote version that's impossible to misinterpret if you want to avoid people trying to tear it apart, and even then they'll sometimes pull it into some wider framework of society and what it means when views through the lens of X, Y and Z and why you should be mad. That's a high bar to hit just to tweet something.
It's crazy, and twitter's where it's easiest to see, but you can also use a news aggregator like news.google.com and get a good dose of it just from the headlines about what is ostensibly the same story from different news agencies. Wild times.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I came to the same realization, but it was unnecessarily difficult to see through all of the snark. If all parties had simply focused on the salient points of disgreement rather than snarking at each other, it could have been cleared up much more quickly. The GP is right; all sides should be embarrassed.
It would not have "been cleared up", because the CEA didn't make an honest mistake, it was a deliberate attempt to seed disinformation in order to support the President's political agenda.
Re: So much of academia is about connections and reputation laundering
#40So much of everything is about connections and reputation. Tech in particular holds up a guise that people are chosen and ascend because they are “good”, meaning, they are good at what they do. That’s part of it, but it’s an insufficient part, and you can do pretty well in a career being solidly average at what you do.
The real currency in my experience is one thing - relationships. Do I think this person likes, respects, and would vouch for me? Everything else aside, that’s what people optimize for when they choose who to promote, respond to reference requests, and generally in who they engage with at work.
Oftentimes It seems like it may not even be a conscious behavior, they just know that’s who they have a gut feeling about.
I definitely wish this wasn’t the way of the world, as someone who isn’t a natural when it comes to building relationships in a professional setting. But I also don’t let it get me down. It’s an element of human nature that’s hidden many layers deep in the workplace.
When I finally faced this fact and started devoting some of the time I previously spent on hard skills, I realized it was far and away the more impactful way to allocate my resources.