3 ms·
Very surprised to see no attempt at discussing regression to the mean other than the quickest possible throw away on pg2, when it is so pervasive and must be o
by gwern 4y ago
Very surprised to see no attempt at discussing regression to the mean other than the quickest possible throw away on pg2, when it is so pervasive and must be operating to at least some degree in any result of the form 'after filtering on extreme event Y, variable X decreased/increased!' Most of the data seems pretty silent on this. (Yes, yes, the two groups look pretty similar temporally in raw # of papers before Fields, but you don't get a Fields for simply publishing a lot - by definition the Fields medalists' papers were different from and better than the non-medalists, and that's why they won.)
- dchftcs 4y agoRegression to the mean is ruled out by comparing against strong contemporaries, whose number of papers produced kept growing on average. This group of strong contemporaries was not selected by looking at the number of papers, but instead by looking at the pool of strong mathematicians selected for other prizes.
- CloseChoice 4y agoYou are right, but it is not ruled out entirely because they used Wolf and Abel prize in the contenders group, which are awarded for a lifetime of work in mathematics and therefore biasing the contender groups.
- gwern 4y agoAnd, as I already pointed out, the non-award-winners must by definition be different from award-winners and cannot control for unobserved baseline differences. Even more so if those prizes are, as is only sane, intended to reward different things than what the most prestigious prize in the field already rewards...
- nequo 4y agoFigure 2 shows increased “cognitive mobility” after receiving the Fields medal. This suggests that the story in the number of papers and the citation counts is not regression to the mean but switching to a new area where the medalist is less experienced.