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I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

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Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#21

Post by constantcrying »

ggm wrote: post #19
constantcrying wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't that Friedman is right or wrong, but that the statistic model tells him to reject his hypothesis, even though he observed a result consistent with his hypothesis. >is simultaneously an appeal to emotion and a presumptuous ad hominem. I don't see how that is the case.

Because it makes Friedman heartless. He feels bad but he still promulgated theories which wreaked the badness he felt bad about. So it goes to character. If he _really_ felt bad, he'd have done what Norbert Weiner did and move out of the field. He stayed an economist. Not so bad feeling, eh?

Predicting a negative effect is extremely common in science effecting humans. No reason to abandon a field.

>but he still promulgated theories which wreaked the badness he felt bad about

No. His prediction was that increasing the minimum wage leads to increased unemployment. He predicted a negative effect and a negative effect happened.

None of this has to do with article, which makes a very simple point about statistics.

Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#22

Post by fsckboy »

neonate wrote: post #13
jldugger wrote: post #8

> Note: By theory I merely mean the rationale for investigating the effect of x on y. A theory can be as simple as “I think people value a mug more once they own it”. Hoo boy, the [2019] is well deserved on this one -- that's a dan arielly reference from before The 2021 Accusation and before the recent NPR story refuting his excuse[1]. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190568472/dan-ariely-frances...

What is the reference? I don't get it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely#Accusations_of_data...

Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#23

Post by jldugger »

neonate wrote: post #13
jldugger wrote: post #8

> Note: By theory I merely mean the rationale for investigating the effect of x on y. A theory can be as simple as “I think people value a mug more once they own it”. Hoo boy, the [2019] is well deserved on this one -- that's a dan arielly reference from before The 2021 Accusation and before the recent NPR story refuting his excuse[1]. [1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/27/1190568472/dan-ariely-frances...

What is the reference? I don't get it.

I could swear one of his research projects involved asking people to make a mug and pricing it out after they finished. But I guess it was Kahneman that researched mugs? Whoops

Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#24

Post by systemvoltage »

travisjungroth wrote: post #16
Konohamaru wrote: post #2

Milton Friedman was correct: because the true minimum wage is $0.00 (unemployment), he was correct to compare wage increase to the null hypothesis. The potshot in the opening paragraph ("Milton feels bad about the unemployed but good about his theory.") is simultaneously an appeal to emotion and a presumptuous ad hominem.

Potshot? It just seems like a joke, but one that puts this character (a nod to Milton Friedman but not like a serious insert) in a positive light. He’s pleased by being correct but sympathetic since he was right about something bad happening to people (unemployment).

If anyone that’s taking potshots, it’s the author.

Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#25

Post by kgwgk »

> wait until you understand Bayes Factors

I'm not sure that piece will help people to understand Bayes Factors: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/09/10/i-hate-bay...

> In social science, theory alone will not deliver one [hypothesis to test]

I guess it's difficult to test a hypothesis when you don't really have one.

Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#26

Post by ggm »

constantcrying wrote: post #21
ggm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it makes Friedman heartless. He feels bad but he still promulgated theories which wreaked the badness he felt bad about. So it goes to character. If he _really_ felt bad, he'd have done what Norbert Weiner did and move out of the field. He stayed an economist. Not so bad feeling, eh?

Predicting a negative effect is extremely common in science effecting humans. No reason to abandon a field. >but he still promulgated theories which wreaked the badness he felt bad about No. His prediction was that increasing the minimum wage leads to increased unemployment. He predicted a negative effect and a negative effect happened. None of this has to do with article, which makes a very simple point about statis…

> None of this has to do with article, which makes a very simple point about statistics.

I am addressing a 'how is this ad hom' question not Friedman's character or the article. I seek to explain what view of him would be a critique of character not substance.

Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#27

Post by LudwigNagasena »

travisjungroth wrote: post #20

I’ve been working a lot with Bayes factors lately. I don’t want to sound cultish, but I think part of the issue is this stuff doesn’t work “half way”. As soon as you’re talking about the null hypothesis and Bayes factors, you’re mixing up two schools of thought that don’t play nice. Bayes factors work with comparing models. There is no null model. What, 0% effect? Ok, there was a non-zero effect. That model loses sin…

> Bayes factors work with comparing models.

So does the traditional Neyman–Pearson hypothesis testing.

> There is no null model.

Why can’t there be?

> What, 0% effect? Ok, there was a non-zero effect. That model loses since it put the probability of 0% at 1 and everything else at 0%.

Well, if your null hypothesis is deterministic and says 0% effect, getting anything other than 0% absolutely will make you reject the null hypothesis. But most of the time hypotheses are not deterministic. Usually you sample random variables.

> And if you do anything else, you’re encoding some amount of belief into the model, some judgment you’ve made.

Traditional hypothesis testing is a particular case of minimising risk, ie the expected value of your loss given possible models and your decision rule. You don’t assume any belief on the probability of a specific model to be true, thus I think it is incorrect to claim that you encode a belief. You don’t even claim that it can be measured.

Of course, that makes it impossible to quantify the risk over all possible models. Thus, you only deal with Type I and Type II errors, which values presumes that the null or alternative hypothesis is correct.

If you have a probability measure for models, you can simply average your risks over it and get what is known as Bayes risk. That would be encoding some belief.

Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#28

Post by MrManatee »

If the minimum wage is increased $4, the competing explanations seem to be:

1. Change in unemployment is normally distributed with mean 0% and standard deviation 0.606%.

2. Change in unemployment is uniformly distributed between 1% and 10%.

I don't really agree that "(1) vs (2)" is a particularly good formulation of the original question ("Would raising the minimum wage by $4 lead to greater unemployment?"). But if it were, how would the math work out?

If we observe that unemployment increases 1%, then yes, that piece of evidence is very slightly in favor of explanation (1). This doesn't feel weird or paradoxical to me. But surely we wouldn't want to decide the matter based just on that one inconclusive data point? Instead we would want to look at another instance of the same situation. If in that case an increase of, say, 6% would (almost) conclusively settle the matter in favor of (2), and an increase of, say, 0.8% would (absolutely) conclusively settle the matter in favor of (1).

Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#29

Post by fridental »

So you have just one data point and you want to do statistics about it? No matter what you do, the results won't be useful.

In Bayesian approach, you start with some distribution that is a wild guess and doesn't even need to base on any knowledge besides of the basics how money work and that unemployment cannot be 0% or 100%. Each data point will refine your distribution until at some dataset size, it will converge to something estimating the reality.

You might want to watch an amazingly helpful introduction by Richard McElreath here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guTdrfycW2Q

Re: I don't use Bayes factors in my research (2019)

#30

Post by constantcrying »

ggm wrote: post #26
constantcrying wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicting a negative effect is extremely common in science effecting humans. No reason to abandon a field. >but he still promulgated theories which wreaked the badness he felt bad about No. His prediction was that increasing the minimum wage leads to increased unemployment. He predicted a negative effect and a negative effect happened. None of this has to do with article, which makes a very simple point about statis…

> None of this has to do with article, which makes a very simple point about statistics. I am addressing a 'how is this ad hom' question not Friedman's character or the article. I seek to explain what view of him would be a critique of character not substance.

It isn't an adhom because it is irrelevant.
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