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No Wonder So Many People are Depressed

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David Libra

I dare you to try


Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda

PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2018 11:43 am
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I’m not sure I can help with the clarifications you seek, K, but I agree that this looks like a highly dubious data set and conclusion.
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2018 3:27 pm
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I think the caption and text shown on the previous page ( http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?p=1846543#1846543 ) give us enough clarification (sort of), David.

From the text, it seems Mr. P 'made' the plot (perhaps a student did it for him) after getting the idea from Mr. S-D's work. Mr. S-D got an econ degree out of obsession with the "trends" tool and wrote a book about it too (entitled Everybody Lies). Importantly, the source info reveals what the real search was, which of course raises the following issue...


Mugwump wrote:
As I suspected, it is a very porous dataset. Instead of searching for “N***** jokes”, people may nowadays search for “non-PC jokes”, for “racist jokes”, for “black deaths matter” jokes, or other combinations.
...

This is one reason the sketchy labelling of the curves and figure are so bad. The broader description of these curves as searches for "racist jokes", etc. really hides the issue. At the very least, he should have made an attempt to investigate different combinations, A OR B OR C... Apart from the issue of searches left out, there is also the issue of searches wrongly included. The claim is that in rap songs and African-American culture it's always spelled "n***a", which if true would eliminate that particular problem.


Here is what the "trends" tool gives for "n***** jokes". This should now match Mr. P's Fig 15-2. Does it?


Last edited by K on Sat Jul 07, 2018 3:53 pm; edited 3 times in total
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HAL 

Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.


Joined: 17 Mar 2003


PostPosted: Sat Jul 07, 2018 3:30 pm
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You can have a look at my source code. Suppose I said it does.
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2018 1:50 pm
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It looks to my eye like that pic above from the "trends" website does match EN's Fig. 15-2. I don't think I like the way SAP smoothed it, but let me ignore that for now...

An obvious question is: why look for "n***** jokes" rather than just "n*****"? It's an offensive word, so both might be thought to indicate racism in the searcher. (The way the "trends" tool works, "n***** jokes" searches count as a subset of "n*****" searches, though it apparently lets one specify not to include cases including "jokes", if you want.)

Here is what search interest over time looks like for just "n******". [As usual, log in to view (or out to avoid!).]

TBC
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2018 9:07 pm
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[ctd]

The site also lets you compare the two searches, so you can see the relative frequency of searches. (The site does not give total numbers of searches, but just figures relative to the highest-search month.) Here's the pic. [Log in to view.]

It looks like "n***** jokes" searches are maybe 15% of "n*****" searches over the period 2004-present.

Of course, I assume we all feel that attitudes to casual racism, etc. have changed, but do you think they've changed dramatically over such a short period as the last decade or so?

TBC
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Mon Jul 09, 2018 3:05 pm
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[ctd]

The "n*****" relative search frequency looks quite flat, doesn't it? At least it seems so in two periods, 2004-2009(ish) and 2009(ish)-present, with the line in the second period lower than in the first.

If they're going to make grand claims about allegedly diminishing racism, one would think they should have thought about what would be a valid comparison ---- a reference or control or baseline search term, you could call it. One idea is to compare "n***** jokes" with simply "jokes". Since the above pic shows "n***** jokes" searches being just a fraction of "n*****" searches, I compared "n*****" searches and "jokes" searches. (This is almost as exciting as playing Fortnite --- well, almost as exciting as I presume playing Fortnite must be, at least to teenage boys and AFL footballers.) Here is the result. (Perhaps look at this and the above pic together.) [Log in to view.]

Is it not suggesting something rather different from their claims?

TBC
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Tue Jul 10, 2018 4:03 pm
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[ctd]

As well as comparing relative search frequencies for "n***** jokes", "jokes", and "n*****", we could compare "n*****" and "African American". Here is that pic.

Is there some sort of relevant official holiday or week near the start of each year? ... Okay, a hasty web search tells me that Martin Luther King Day is held on the third Monday of January. Does that explain the annual spike shown in the pic? [Update: looking at the search term "Martin Luther King" seems to confirm this explanation.]

TBC
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2018 9:19 pm
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[ctd]

What about the book of Stephens-Davidowitz, the guy specializing in web-search data? I was disturbed that in the book he incorrectly describes (the psychologist) Kahneman as an economist; I don't think it's acceptable to get someone's profession wrong. (Perhaps it's worse to spell someone's name incorrectly, as Pinker does in his book, but then the author can always claim it was "just a typo".) Maybe even more disturbing is that Pinker wrote the foreword to S-D's book.

Anyway...

The table below is from S-D's book. It shows "the top five negative words used in searches" about blacks, Jews, etc. Isn't it interesting how racists seem to be convinced that other racial groups are racist?

I took the first line and used the "trends" tool website to make the chart below S-D's table. You'll see that the ordering seems to have changed, from "rude", "racist", "stupid", "ugly", "lazy" to "racist", "ugly", "stupid", "rude", "lazy".

The chart clearly shows that many, maybe all, of the relative search frequencies for these negative terms have increased, especially the leading search term, "racist black people".


Last edited by K on Thu Jul 12, 2018 5:15 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne

PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2018 10:25 pm
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^ usually I would agree that it’s not a good sign to get the profession of an expert wrong when you are citing them, but Kahneman was awarded a Nobel in Economics, and much of his work does touch on economic decision-making. So while he’s a psychologist by training and method, i think it is reasonable to describe him as an economist. If they’d described him as (say) an engineer or a literary critic it’d be a serious faux pas, but economist is a valid classification.

His book “Thinking Fast and Slow” is a masterpiece, combining a wealth of well-evidenced insightful material with utterly lucid exposition of complicated concepts. He shows very clearly that reason as a far more fragile instrument than we suppose, even in highly intelligent people.

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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Thu Jul 12, 2018 3:50 pm
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^ Yes, there are some subtleties here. In general, I'm disturbed when authors of what is supposed to be non-fiction don't bother getting easily checkable information right. (Surely, if you're too lazy to do it yourself, you can hire some child to check the spelling of people's names, for example.) On the other hand, in the specific case of expertise and professions, perhaps one should not pidgeon-hole or stereotype people.

The term S-D used was something like "Nobel Prize economist Kahneman", so in some sense it seems S-D was trying to squeeze in the fact that DK won the Nobel Prize in Economics without breaking stride. I'm quite sure Kahneman would not describe himself as an economist, though, and you'll often read things like "who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, although he is actually a psychologist". On Nobel Prizes in Economics, I'd be alarmed if John Nash were described as a "Nobel Prize economist", rather than a mathematician who won that Nobel Prize. (And one might suggest that many winners of the Nobel Peace Prize are anything but peaceful humans, but that is a separate topic.)

It's true this branch of psychology has been given the name "behavioural economics". But to describe one of its practitioners as a "behavioural economist" is rather jarring to my ear. This is a fascinating area, though the reliability and reproducibility of results is a major concern. I was sort of trying to pose a question in behavioural economics in this thread when I asked if people's attitudes to the US homicide rate over time were affected by all those different starting years in the different plots. I failed to get any responses, but never fear: no doubt we'll return to the topic of homicide some time soon, certainly before 2050. Wink


Addendum (amusing quote):

"I will never know if my vocation as a psychologist was a result of my early exposure to interesting gossip, or whether my interest in gossip was an indication of a budding vocation." (Kahneman.)
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2018 4:59 pm
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Mugwump wrote:
...
His [Kahneman's] book “Thinking Fast and Slow” is a masterpiece, combining a wealth of well-evidenced insightful material with utterly lucid exposition of complicated concepts. ...

Kahneman's book, as well as Piketty's, actually comes up in SSD's, when he paraphrases a WSJ article by Ellenberg (a maths professor).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-summers-most-unread-book-is-1404417569

Jordan Ellenberg:

"How can we find today's greatest non-reads? Amazon's "Popular Highlights" feature provides one quick and dirty measure. Every book's Kindle page lists the five passages most highlighted by readers. If every reader is getting to the end, those highlights could be scattered throughout the length of the book. If nobody has made it past the introduction, the popular highlights will be clustered at the beginning.

Thus, the Hawking Index (HI): Take the page numbers of a book's five top highlights, average them, and divide by the number of pages in the whole book. The higher the number, the more of the book we're guessing most people are likely to have read. (Disclaimer: This is not remotely scientific and is for entertainment purposes only!) Here's how some current best sellers and classics weigh in, from highest HI to lowest:

"The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt : 98.5%
...
"Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman : 6.8%
...
"A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking: 6.6%
The original avatar backs up its reputation pretty well. But it's outpaced by one more recent entrant—which brings us to our champion, the most unread book of this year (and perhaps any other). Ladies and gentlemen, I present:

"Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty : 2.4%"



Here is how SSD describes it in his book.

Stephens-Davidowitz:

"Ellenberg ... was curious about how many people actually finish books. He thought of an ingenious way to test it using Big Data. Amazon reports how many people quote various lines in books. Ellenberg realized he could compare how frequently quotes were highlighted at the beginning of the book versus the end of the book. This would give a rough guide to readers’ propensity to make it to the end. By his measure, more than 90 percent of readers finished Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch. In contrast, only about 7 percent made it through Nobel Prize economist Daniel Kahenman’s magnum opus, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Fewer than 3 percent, this rough methodology estimated, made it to the end of economist Thomas Piketty’s much discussed and praised Capital in the 21st Century."


That is not even close to a correct description of what Ellenberg wrote...

TBC
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Mon Jul 16, 2018 6:09 pm
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[CTD]

If you read what JE and SSD wrote (above) one after the other, is it easy to see what SSD got wrong? In some sense, the error is two-fold or double-layered. JE commented on it on someone else's blog and SSD replied. (That's what I saw first.) Here is what they wrote.


Ellenberg:

"My only complaint — but it’s a real one — is that I tried to make it crystal clear that “Piketty index” was not meant to be an estimate for the proportion of readers who finished the book! At best it’s supposed to be a function of “mean proportion of the book finished” which is roughly monotone, but even that I’d question, and of course “mean proportion of the book finished” is not at all the same thing as “proportion of readers who finished the book.”

To be fair to SSD, he is not the only person who glossed my article that way, so the fault may be in my lack of clarity."



Stephens-Davidowitz:

"Whoops. Sorry. I will change in revision.
Do you think they’re that different?
And since it’s clearly a rough estimate anyway, for obvious reasons — the best material may be in the beginning of the book — do you think, once saying it is a “rough estimate” going from “mean proportion” to “proportion of readers” is a particularly large leap?"


Stephens-Davidowitz (16 minutes later):

"Hi Jordan, sorry. I will clarify in revision.
However, clearly this is a rough methodology — the best quotes may be at the beginning of the book.
Once you acknowledge it is a rough methodology, do you think the leap from mean proportion to proportion of readers is a large one? that seems a tiny leap relative to the leap from quotes highlighted to pages read.
Anyway, I am a big fan of your writing."



This suggests that Stephens-Davidowitz still does not fully grasp the problem with what he wrote...

TBC
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Fri Jul 20, 2018 5:44 pm
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[CTD]

How is it possible for someone with an economics PhD to fail to get it, even when it's explained for him?
In football analogies, here's what Stephens-Davidowitz doesn't seem to realize:

Say the AFL refuses to tell us the teams' scores in their matches, but gives us the number of shots at goal of each team.

Statement 1: If team A has a greater number of shots at goal than team B, it's likely that team A has a greater score than team B.

Statement 2: The number of shots at goal team A records is roughly equal to the score of team A.

Statement 1 seems plausible; to see how good an estimate it gives, we'd have to look at data from past games. Statement 1 is analogous to Ellenberg's statements. But Statement 2 is clearly wrong; the nature of our game's scoring system makes this obvious.

Okay, now stay with AFL, but switch to a different analogy. Say we're interested in interchange rotations, percentage of time on-field, etc.

Statement 2b: On average, each footballer plays 81.81...% of the game time (the remainder spent on the bench).

Statement 3: On average, 81.81...% of the team play the entire game.

Statement 2b seems reasonable; in fact, it must be true (unless we cheat or have a deluge of injuries). Statement 3 immediately sounds wrong; in fact, it can never be true (unless the bench is wiped out at the start and there are no rotations).


Stephens-Davidowitz not only falsely assumes Statement 1 is equivalent to Statement 2, but also falsely assumes Statement 2b is equivalent to Statement 3.
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Tue Jul 24, 2018 5:31 am
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If we attempt to be Kahneman, we might guess that SSD's mistakes were partly due to his intuition that the word "rough(ly)" would save everything; that might be the case if the problem were merely one of imprecision, but since the statement is not even approximately correct, no number of words like "rough", "estimate", etc. sprinkled in the text are going to help.

The one problem SSD saw ("the best quotes may be at the beginning of the book") may also have acted like a decoy, making it difficult for SSD to see the other problems.

How should we view all this? I guess it really means readers should be (even more) wary of the claims in his book. It's like we witnessed a spontaneous, accidental test, which he failed badly.
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K 



Joined: 09 Sep 2011


PostPosted: Sun Jul 29, 2018 2:22 am
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Mugwump wrote:
...
His [Kahneman's] book “Thinking Fast and Slow” is a masterpiece, combining a wealth of well-evidenced insightful material with utterly lucid exposition of complicated concepts. He shows very clearly that reason as a far more fragile instrument than we suppose, even in highly intelligent people.

The thing I like about Kahneman is his self-doubt, his self-criticism. His relationship with his collaborator Tversky, a very different personality, is also fascinating; it seems like it was in effect a platonic love affair, complicated by professional stresses and their personality differences. The manner of its ending reads like a tragedy. Have you read Lewis's book about this (The Undoing Project)? I haven't yet.

In general, I'm suspicious of Lewis's books, because he doesn't worry about letting the facts get in the way of a good story. That's definitely the case with those books that have been made into movies. Maybe he should just be a pulp-fiction writer. Or is it still a big leap for someone who can produce page-turners loosely based on truth to write completely fictional tales? But in this case, it seems that by accident he had some sort of connection with Tversky's family, so he had access to inside information that others would not have.

At this rate, we should perhaps start a VPT book-club thread. Wink The problem is that such a thing would surely be best done as two threads: one for great books and one for terrible books (just as there are separate "What made you happy?" and "What made you sad?" threads). But then, VPTers might violently disagree about which thread a book belongs in, or not know before the discussion begins...
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