This is one of the most beautifully annihilating book reviews I have ever seen, and I say that with deep jealousy.

Going from a p-value of 10^-16 to 0.027 is --- painful. IFrom the lack of a response, I tend to infer that there's no arguing back...
Prediction: the original association will continue to be cited without correction.

Oh, dear.

I have read none of the nominated books and so I have no legitimate opinion about whether he's being fair. (Except that I don't think that's a good description of Stross's style in general.) But it's a joy to watch.

This actually looks more like a job for nonparametric regression, or even relative distribution comparisons, but still...

It's the comparison of the same teacher in the same year on the same subject but in different grades which clinches the model being an EPIC FAIL.

To be clear, the bad data analysis is on the part of whatever hacks came p with the value added model being used here. These results are insane.

"Researchers have looked at comparisons between medical epidemiological research and psychological research using effect size r in an effort to compare relative effects. Often the outcomes of such efforts have demonstrated comparatively low effects for medical epidemiology research in comparison with effect sizes seen in psychology. The conclusion has often been that relatively small effects seen in psychology research are as strong as those found in important epidemiological medical research. The author suggests that many of the calculated effect sizes from medical epidemiological research on which this conclusion has been based are flawed. Specifically, rather than calculating effect sizes for treatment, many results have been for a Treatment Effect × Disease Effect interaction that was irrelevant to the main study hypothesis. A technique for developing a “hypothesis-relevant” effect size r is proposed."

"To understand what Murray does in Coming Apart, imagine this analogy: A social scientist visits a Gulf Coast town. He notices that the houses near the water have all been smashed and shattered. The former occupants now live in tents and FEMA trailers. The social scientist writes a report: 'The evidence strongly shows that living in houses is better for children and families than living in tents and trailers. The people on the waterfront are irresponsibly subjecting their children to unacceptable conditions.'
"When he publishes his report, somebody points out: "You know, there was a hurricane here last week." The social scientist shrugs off the criticism with the reply, "I'm writing about housing, not weather." "

---All parts of Frum's review are worth reading.

That was not one of Noah's better performances, no.

Massively-hyped paper trying to model language history using lightly-repurposed biological models comprehensively debunked by very careful and linguistically-informed data analysis. One of the authors of the debunking shows up in the comments, and says:
"Finally, regarding press; a few news organisations were interested in the initial pitch, but lost interest when they realised that we didn't have a good story here about human origins."

Coates contra Paul, II.

Coates contra Paul, I:

"The fervency for Ron Paul is rooted in the longing for a reedemer, for one who will rise up and cut through the dishonest pablum of horse-races and sloganeering and speak directly to Americans. It is a species of saviorism which hopes to deliver a prophet onto the people, who will be better than the people themselves. 

But every man is a prophet, until he faces a Congress."

"There is currently much debate about the effectiveness of foreign aid and about what kind of projects can engender economic development. There is skepticism about the ability of econometric analysis to resolve these issues or of development agencies to learn from their own experience. In response, there is increasing use in development economics of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to accumulate credible knowl- edge of what works, without overreliance on questionable theory or statistical meth- ods. When RCTs are not possible, the proponents of these methods advocate quasi- randomization through instrumental variable (IV) techniques or natural experiments. I argue that many of these applications are unlikely to recover quantities that are use- ful for policy or understanding: two key issues are the misunderstanding of exogeneity and the handling of heterogeneity. I illustrate from the literature on aid and growth. Actual randomization faces similar problems as does quasi-randomization, notwith- standing rhetoric to the contrary. I argue that experiments have no special ability to produce more credible knowledge than other methods, and that actual experiments are frequently subject to practical problems that undermine any claims to statisti- cal or epistemic superiority. I illustrate using prominent experiments in development and elsewhere. As with IV methods, RCT-based evaluation of projects, without guid- ance from an understanding of underlying mechanisms, is unlikely to lead to scientific progress in the understanding of economic development. I welcome recent trends in development experimentation away from the evaluation of projects and toward the evaluation of theoretical mechanisms."

Economics as right-wing ideology, iteration #5,678,183 in a series of aleph-null.

Actually, I suspect that Ferguson knows _all too well_ what "western civilization" has historically meant...

Read this, and remember (i) that Bryan Caplan thinks that the problem with democracy is that voters are irrational and make elementary mistakes in economics, and (ii) that Tyler Cowen thinks Bryan Caplan is a valuable social thinker.

"For my part the whole notion of The New Republic calling out "overrated thinkers" is sheer spectacle -- like watching Uwe Boll flailing at film criticism, but worse. How does The New Republic, with any semblance of a straight face, damn Fareed Zakaria because he was "for the Iraq war when almost everybody was for it, criticized it when almost everybody criticized it"? ... Bigotry is a species of intellectual sloth -- but some sloths have social capital."

This is, indeed, one of the high points of the blogger's art.

I have been avoiding reading Graber's book, since it didn't sound like it was any advance over Polanyi's (classic!) _The Great Transformation_.  But this is great, so I'm sold.

Look at those simulation results!

"It is shown that homogeneous, short-range, two-dimensional (2D) cortical connectivity, without modularity, hierarchy, or other specialized structure, reproduces key observed properties of cortical networks, including low path length, high clustering and modularity index, and apparent hierarchical block-diagonal structure in connection matrices. Geometry strongly influences connection matrices, implying that simple interpretations of connectivity measures as reflecting specialized structure can be misleading: Such apparent structure is seen in strictly uniform, locally connected architectures in 2D. Geometry is thus a proxy for function, modularity, and hierarchy and must be accounted for when structural inferences are made."

"The revolution heralded by Eagleman's barrage of rhetorical questions and attacks on strawmen is a damp squib. If the neurosciences are going to make a genuine contribution to issues like this, the onus must be on us to engage with existing thought on complicated matters like criminal justice and provide detailed evidence of how neuroscience can inform these existing systems, rather than pretending that new findings in the lab can sweep away thousands of years of cultural and philosophical endeavour."

To put it a bit more kindly than Tom does, the _cognitive_ value of traditions like Turkle's is "heuristic" in the older sense: they _make up_ speculations and conjectures, but do not combine them with data in a way that has any real force as evidence.  In the case of psychoanalysis, the track record even as heuristic is not exactly encouraging...

In this corner, a distinguished experimental psychologist who can actually read a paper in PNAS; in that corner, John Tierney.

Now that is how you give these idiots the business...  The last paragraph is a lovely encapsulation of just how foolish the whole enterprise really is.

Hear, hear, hear.

If I had to summarize my problems with mainstream economics in two words, they would be "Gary Becker".

"IWilliams is not actually examining the accepted scholarship which Carol Sheriff is referencing. Williams is not debating with James McPherson's ... Battle Cry of Freedom. He does not confront historian Bruce Levine's Confederate Emancipation... Instead Williams offers up--unchallenged, uncorroborated and wholly accepted--primary testimony from 150 years ago, along with two works of history both more than seventy-five years old.
"... Williams is practicing history in the manner of a phrenologist practicing brain surgery... In raising primary sources to the level of indisputable fact, Williams employs a methodology which does not merely argue for the existence of black Confederate legions, but for UFOs, orcs, the Dover Demon, elves and magic. The sable Confederate arm is too modest. Surely, Nessie awaits. I would not demand that history remain solely the property of professionals. But I would simply see a basic commitment to honesty from academics plying a borrowed trade...."

"...social scientists have increasingly turned to matching [to draw] causal inferences from observational data. Matching compares those who receive a treatment to those with similar background attributes who do not receive a treatment. ... Drawing on a randomized voter mobilization experiment ... compare matching [estimates] to an experimental benchmark. ... enormous sample size .... exactly match each treated subject to 40 untreated subjects. Matching greatly exaggerates the effectiveness of pre-election phone calls encouraging voter participation. ... Matching suggests that another pre-election phone call that encouraged people to wear their seat belts also generated huge increases in voter turnout. ... caution is warranted when applying matching estimators to observational data, particularly when one is uncertain about the potential for biased inference." Ouch!

"All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt. This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand’s world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he’d be anywhere else. Yes, he’s a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He’s still a genocidal prick. Indeed, if John Galt were portrayed as an intelligent cup of yogurt rather than poured into human form, this would be obvious. Oh my god, that cup of yogurt wants to kill most of humanity to make a philosophical point! Somebody eat him quick! And that would be that."

"And that, children, is how ideology does its work in the world, even when nobody involved thinks that what they’re doing is ideological. Or, perhaps, especially when nobody involved imagines such a thing."

This, this, this.

Now that is what I call a _compelling_ homework assignment. (So much so, in fact, that I am not altogether comfortable with the idea of giving it. But at the same time so much of the rest of what they'd be getting in their economics classes is _also_ priming/framing/forcing, in a rather more underhanded way, that this might only be fair.)

Is it possible to call someone an incompetent hack any more politely and subtly than this?

"Much has been made of the failure of modern macroeconomics to predict or understand the Great Recession of 2007–2009. In this MACRO FOCUS, our resident time-series econo- metrician, James Morley*, explains what is currently meant by “modern” macroeconomics, what is behind its failure, and what can be done to rehabilitate its reputation."

Yes, yes, and again yes!

Do go through to read the pieces by Coyne in full, they are very good, and quite merciless. (I am proud to say that the issue of depression massively lowering fitness occurred to me immediately as the chief problem, but I didn't blog about it.)

Simon and Samuelson take turns beating up (independently) on Milton Friedman's exquisitely bad and incredibly influential "Methodology of Positive Economics" essay. Large scan of a xerox out of a book, from the CMU library's online collection of Simon's personal files.

Well, that's one book I won't have to bother with.

Review of Fodor & Piatelli-Palmarini.

David Brooks is an idiot with no grasp of what American society is like or has been like; in other news, water is wet.

And this, children, is how publicizing scientific findings actually comes to create myths.

"So there are a lot of people out there who think that we need to kill the moral hazard of having your savings account insured. Grandma has $12,000 in her savings account, and doesn’t worry about whether or not the bank is solvent – so let’s force her to worry by removing the FDIC protection. This worrying will result in her providing discipline to her bank on their risk. ... How will grandma know what to do? ... I know the simple way you do it, some techniques that I’ve had some training in: You place out the payment structures using monte-carlo simulations with lognormal random walks; you take a metric of correlation in the market, perhaps in a gaussian copula structure and use that to run correlations at each step between the instruments; you take the distribution you generate and apply a “value-at-risk” logic to it, looking at some piece of the tail distribution.
... a 16-year old who wants to open a savings account for his part-time job will need to know these techniques..."

"the real meaning of social democracy for a developed country—you get more equality and more vacation, with no real impact on the rate of growth. There’s a case to be made that less vacation and better televisions are a better deal than more vacation and worse televisions (the two things I like to do on vacation are go to Europe and watch TV, so I have mixed feelings about this) and there’s a tradition of philosophical argument which holds that the failure of modern mixed economies to be sufficiently solicitous of the interests of the wealthy is a major source of injustice. But though some level of income inequality would seem to be necessary to achieve economic growth, within the range that actual developed countries exist at there’s no evidence that inegalitarian policies boost growth."

Actually, this kind of makes me want to read _The American Evasion of Philosophy_; which I guess shows that McLemee isn't being _simply_ malicious.

In which Denny Borsboom and friends take their turn bashing their heads against the wall.

Now this is what I call an epic take-down.

I thought I was joking in http://bactra.org/weblog/524.html, but we really haven't moved on at all from nineteen-twenty-fucking-two.

""the claim that `modern macro' somehow has the special virtue of following theprinciples of economic theory is tendentious and misleading... The otherpossible defense of modern macro is that, however special it may seem, it isjustified empirically. This too strikes me as a delusion.""

Krugman savages Kevin Kelly's "New Rules for a New Economy", back when those were new.

Causal inference FAIL.