31 ms·

Lies, damn lies and statistics ... I have yet to find a person that does not do its best to find a data presentation that suits the agenda.

scottlocklin 11y ago
It's horse shit on inspection. Of course, so are virtually all economics papers, so let them eat each other alive for all I care.
- tajen 11y ago
  Please document your judgement. I'm usually one of the first ones to detect horse shit in women-victimizing papers, usually by matching statistics with reality. For example, given that I've seen many (if not almost all) women in my programming environment being promoted to "managers" earlier than men, statistics about women being paid less in IT "for the same experience" get discredited by the fact that a "manager with 1 year of experience" is not the same when he's had 7 years as a developer under his belt or when she's 24 years old. Studies rarely specify "with the same experience in the current and previous job". Besides the fact that studies are inherently false if they don't explain why women get promoted a lot a lot a lot in the reality I'm witnessing. So you see, I'm open to be on your side. Just in this case, I didn't detect how this study could be biased. Please document, thanks.
  - scottlocklin 11y ago
    The premise that coauthors on papers make equal contributions is in itself grossly biased. They don't. I'm coauthor on papers I've never even read. If you were looking at the class of Scott Locklin on papers I'm named on, assuming everyone is supposed to get equal credit, using the methods they did, I'd be considered to be unfairly not getting enough credit, because there are less of me than everyone else and most of the papers I'm in, I do not deserve equal credit. The proper comparison class is, do principal authors get equal credit for their contributions, normalized to their proportion in the population.
drdeca 11y ago
What about when someone does statistics to make a decision for themselves which they do not reveal?
- tomjen3 11y ago
  Then pretty much by definition we wouldn't hear about it, would we?
- venomsnake 11y ago
  People are also good as self deluding themselves with statistics.
dang 11y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874697 and marked it off-topic.

scottlocklin 11y ago

It's horse shit on inspection. Of course, so are virtually all economics papers, so let them eat each other alive for all I care.

tajen 11y ago
Please document your judgement. I'm usually one of the first ones to detect horse shit in women-victimizing papers, usually by matching statistics with reality. For example, given that I've seen many (if not almost all) women in my programming environment being promoted to "managers" earlier than men, statistics about women being paid less in IT "for the same experience" get discredited by the fact that a "manager with 1 year of experience" is not the same when he's had 7 years as a developer under his belt or when she's 24 years old. Studies rarely specify "with the same experience in the current and previous job". Besides the fact that studies are inherently false if they don't explain why women get promoted a lot a lot a lot in the reality I'm witnessing. So you see, I'm open to be on your side. Just in this case, I didn't detect how this study could be biased. Please document, thanks.
- scottlocklin 11y ago
  The premise that coauthors on papers make equal contributions is in itself grossly biased. They don't. I'm coauthor on papers I've never even read. If you were looking at the class of Scott Locklin on papers I'm named on, assuming everyone is supposed to get equal credit, using the methods they did, I'd be considered to be unfairly not getting enough credit, because there are less of me than everyone else and most of the papers I'm in, I do not deserve equal credit. The proper comparison class is, do principal authors get equal credit for their contributions, normalized to their proportion in the population.

drdeca 11y ago

What about when someone does statistics to make a decision for themselves which they do not reveal?

tomjen3 11y ago
Then pretty much by definition we wouldn't hear about it, would we?
venomsnake 11y ago
People are also good as self deluding themselves with statistics.

dang 11y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874697 and marked it off-topic.