prior probability

Shout out to all first generation scholars and to Kris Harvey, who we met at the inaugural Focus on First Generation Conference held at FIU earlier this week. Ms Harvey is the curator of this helpful website designed for first generation college and graduate students. Among many other things, she shared the following fun and inspirational links with us:

1. Twitter: #firstgenproblems
2. Instagram: firstgenandjuice
3. Literary fiction: Make your home among strangers (Picador, 2016), a novel by Jennine Capo Crucet (book cover and author pictured below)

Article IV, Section 3 of the original 1787 U.S. Constitution delegates to Congress the power to admit new states into the union. Pursuant to this constitutional provision, Representative Darren Soto (pictured below) recently introduced a bill in Congress authorizing the admission of Puerto Rico as a new U.S. state. (Here is the complete text of Soto’s statehood admission bill.) Although we support statehood for Puerto Rico, we are writing this post to point out a potentially glaring omission in Soto’s bill: it does not repeal the Puerto Rican Federal Relations Act (Public Law 600), which ratifies Puerto Rico’s current constitutional status as a territory. If you wish to dig deeper into the politics and history of the island’s territorial status, check out this scholarly paper by Peter J. Fleiss titled “Puerto Rico’s Political Status under Its New Constitution.” In any case, this problem can be easily fixed with some more careful legislative drafting.

The map pictured below visualizes the average daily totals of people entering the USA from Mexico by car, bus, or on foot at various ports of entry along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Credit: The Los Angeles Times

File under: “revisionist history that is probably true.” Although the Athenian philosopher Plato presents the great Socrates as “a man of humble background, little education, few means and unappealing looks,” Plato was probably painting a false or incomplete picture of his erudite mentor, at least according to this intriguing essay by Armand D’Angour, a fellow of Jesus College at Oxford and the author of the book Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher (2019). In brief, there is some evidence to indicate that the flesh-and-bones Socrates was, in fact, not only a wealthy playboy but also an enemy of Athenian democracy. Here is an excerpt from Professor D’Angour’s excellent essay (h/t: Brian Leiter): Continue reading →

We cracked open this mammoth tome in March and are now on page 430, having just finished reading David Foster Wallace’s allegory about the allocation of scarce resources, which also happens to be one of the most fundamental questions in a wide variety of scholarly disciplines, including economics, political philosophy, and law. DFW’s haunting allegory is set on a ledge in the Sonora Desert, where a pair of the most memorable characters in North American literature, Hugh (Helen) Steeply and Remy Marathe, discuss a hypothetical scenario involving a single-serving portion of pea soup. (My colleague Linda Essig provides a good summary of the substance of Steeply and Marathe’s ruminations here.) We shall press on and provide additional updates next month.

Source: Jon Beasley-Murray

Thus far, we have identified several common forms of “data fraud,” including cherry picking, data dredging, and the false cause fallacy. Yet all of these myriad forms of data fraud might be mere symptoms of a larger problem: publication bias. Just as TV and print media compete to report on the most salient or salacious events that will grab their viewers’ or readers’ attention (“If it bleeds, it leads”), scientific journals likewise compete to publish studies with the most exciting, novel, or “sexy” findings. But the problem with this fetish for novelty or salience is that it generates a scholarly market failure, one resulting in the overproduction of sexy studies, or in the words of the good folks at Geckoboard (a UK-based consulting firm), “For every study that shows statistically significant results, there may have been many similar tests that were inconclusive…. Not knowing how many ‘boring’ studies were filed away impacts our ability to judge the validity of the results we read about. When a company claims a certain activity had a major positive impact on growth, other companies may have tried the same thing without success, so they don’t talk about it.” That is why both the news media and the most prestigious scholarly journals often end up presenting such a distorted picture of reality.

Credit: Franco, et al.

Thus far we have seen the related statistical sins of cherry picking and data dredging. Today, let’s talk about the false cause fallacy (or “false causality” for short), which occurs when you observe two events that appear together and then leap to the conclusion that one event must have caused the other. (Here is a mundane example. The video below presents many more.) In reality, just because two events occur together does not mean that one caused the other. The causation may run in the opposite direction or some unobserved third factor might be the underlying cause of both events or there might be no direct or indirect causation at all!