Someone pointed me to a remark someone who felt that statisticians were not doing their job to help out “mathematically challenged” psychology researchers. My first thought was that statisticians often help in an indirect way, by developing advanced methods that...

By Andrew Gelman

This post is mostly not about economics or even politics but rather about the central role of comparisons in statistics and statistical graphics.It started when someone pointed me to this article in which Megan McArdle points out the misleadingness of...

By Andrew Gelman

I was thinking more about David Brooks’s anti-data column from earlier in the week, and I realized what is really bothering me.Brooks expresses skepticism about numbers, about the limitations of raw data, about the importance of human thinking. Fine, I...

By Andrew Gelman

There is it, in the lead of an editorial in the WSJ: Those Misleading World Health Rankings The numbers are distorted because, for instance, U.S. doctors try so hard to save premature babies. And from later in the piece: Another...

By Aaron Carroll

This discussion arose in the context of statistics teaching: April Galyardt writes: I’m teaching my first graduate class this semester. It’s intro stats for graduate students in the college of education. Most of the students are first year PhD students....

By Andrew Gelman