QT:[[”
The taxonomy that has helped me immensely is the three-level hierarchy described in chapter 1 of my book Causality: 1. association, 2. intervention, and 3 counterfactuals. It is a useful hierarchy because it has an objective criterion for the classification: You cannot answer questions at level i unless you have assumptions from level i or higher.
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Posts Tagged ‘quote’
Causal Analysis in Theory and Practice » On the Classification and Subsumption of Causal Models
March 1, 2019Is Ancient DNA Research Revealing New Truths — or Falling Into Old Traps? – The New York Times
March 1, 2019https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/magazine/ancient-dna-paleogenomics.html
has an interesting discussion of review process at Nature
QT:[[”
It has not gone unnoticed that the stunning, magisterial sweep of genetic revisionism, on the one hand, and a genetic emphasis on radical prehistoric migrations, on the other, bear more than a little in common. Some anthropologists
and archaeologists accept this analogy with gallows humor. One told me that I should
model this article after the format of the standard Nature paper: “Ancient DNA Reveals Massive Population Turnovers in the Humanities,” she suggested as a title,
and proposed this as an abstract: “The aristocratic lab scientists arrived with their
superior technology and displaced the pre-existing researchers and their primitive
truth-implements and overcomplicated belief systems.
…
Serious challenges to its soundness were laid out during
Nature’s peer-review process. And yet, in a highly unusual move, the paper was accepted over the steadfast objections of two of the three peer reviewers on its anonymous panel. Confidential documents made available to me reveal deep concerns with the paper’s methods and its conclusions.
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Small research teams ‘disrupt’ science more radically than large ones
February 28, 2019QT:[[”
“The authors describe and validate a citation-based index of ‘disruptiveness’ that has previously been proposed for patents6. The intuition behind the index is straightforward: when the papers that cite a given article also reference a substantial proportion of that article’s references, then the article can be seen as consolidating its scientific domain. When the converse is true — that is, when future citations to the article do not also acknowledge the article’s own intellectual forebears — the article can be seen as disrupting its domain.
The disruptiveness index reflects a characteristic of the article’s underlying content that is clearly distinguishable from impact as conventionally captured by overall citation counts. For instance, the index finds that papers that directly contribute to Nobel prizes tend to exhibit high levels of disruptiveness, whereas, at the other extreme, review articles tend to consolidate their fields.”
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The Eisenhower Method For Taking Action (How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks)
February 20, 2019“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Is Email Making Professors Stupid? – The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 19, 2019“Is Email Making Professors Stupid?” is the Q posed by
https://www.Chronicle.com/interactives/is-email-making-professors-stupid . My A: YES. The article has a nice description of the problem with 24/7 connectivity: how the urgent but unimportant crowds out the important but non-urgent
QT:(((”
“Knuth does provide his mailing address at Stanford, and he asks that people send an old-fashioned letter if they need to contact him. His administrative assistant gathers these letters and presents them to Knuth in batches, getting urgent correspondence to him quickly, and putting everything else into a “buffer” that he reviews, on average, “one day every three months.”
Knuth’s approach to email prioritizes the long-term value of uninterrupted concentration over the short-term convenience of accessibility. Objectively speaking, this tradeoff makes sense, but it’s so foreign to most tenured and tenure-track professors that it can seem ludicrous — more parody than pragmatism. This is because in the modern academic environment professors act more like middle managers than monastics. A major factor driving this reality is the digital communication Knuth so carefully avoids. Faculty life now means contending with an unending stream of electronic missives, many of which come with an expectation of rapid reply.”
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Efforts to make buildings greener are not working
February 9, 2019QT:((”
“One reason is the rebound effect. Insulate buildings better, and people will wear fewer layers rather than turn the heat down. The way energy-efficiency schemes are structured does not help, argues Richard Twinn of the UK Green Building Council, a think-tank. The schemes only finance a single type of upgrade at a time, such as loft insulation. A whole-house retrofit, in contrast, could have added digital
thermostats to ensure that greater efficiency was converted into lower bills rather than higher temperatures.”
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Efforts to make buildings greener are not working
https://www.economist.com/international/2019/01/05/efforts-to-make-buildings-greener-are-not-working
The Presidency: The Hardest Job in the World – The Atlantic
February 9, 2019Good quotes:
QT:((
Hoover noted, “When we are sick, we want an uncommon doctor; when we have a construction job to do, we want an uncommon engineer; and when we are at war, we want an uncommon general. It is only when we get into politics that we are satisfied with the common man.”
…
There’s just too much to do. Instead, presidents should follow Calvin Coolidge’s model. “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business,” he said. …
Can one person handle all this? In 1955, former President Herbert Hoover completed a review—his second—of executive-branch efficiency and suggested the addition of an administrative vice president to help the overloaded president. (The existing vice president was apparently already too busy.) Hoover’s report was issued a few months before President Eisenhower had his first heart attack. It was the fifth heart attack or stroke to hit a current or former president since the Wilson administration ended, in 1921. This caused the columnist Walter Lippmann to wonder whether the job was too much for one man to bear. Addressing the “intolerable strain” on the president, Lippmann wrote, “The load has become so enormously greater … because of the wars of this century, because of the huge growth of the American population, of the American economy, and of American responsibilities.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/a-broken-office/556883/
AlphaFold @ CASP13: “What just happened?”
February 7, 2019QT:((”
“Let me get the most important question out of the way: is AlphaFold’s advance really significant, or is it more of the same? I would characterize their advance as roughly two CASPs in one (really ~1.8x). Historically progress in CASP has ebbed and flowed, with a ten year period of almost absolute stagnation, finally broken by the advances seen at CASP11 and 12, which were substantial. What we’ve seen this year is roughly twice as much as the recent average rate of advance (measured in mean ΔGDT_TS from CASP10 to CASP12—GDT_TS is a measure of prediction accuracy ranging from 0 to 100, with 100 being perfect.) As I will explain later, there may actually be a good reason for this “two CASPs” effect, in terms of the underlying methodological breakdown. This can be seen not only in the CASP-over-CASP
improvement, but also in terms of the size of the gap between AlphaFold and the second best performer, which is unusually large by CASP standards. Below is a plot that depicts this.”
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https://moalquraishi.wordpress.com/2018/12/09/alphafold-casp13-what-just-happened/
Instrumental variables estimation – Wikipedia
February 3, 2019QT:((”
Intuitively, IVs are used when an explanatory variable of interest is correlated with the error term, in which case ordinary least squares and ANOVA give biased results.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variables_estimation
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