Saturday, May 23, 2009

The "All Else Equal" Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it's not gonna be.

TO BE NOTED: From Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science:

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Handy statistical lexicon
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These are all important methods and concepts related to statistics that are not as well known as they should be. I hope that by giving them names, we will make the ideas more accessible to people:

Mister P: Multilevel regression and poststratification.

The Secret Weapon: Fitting a statistical model repeatedly on several different datasets and then displaying all these estimates together.

The Superplot: Line plot of estimates in an interaction, with circles showing group sizes and a line showing the regression of the aggregate averages.

The Folk Theorem: When you have computational problems, often there's a problem with your model.

The Pinch-Hitter Syndrome: People whose job it is to do just one thing are not always so good at that one thing.

Weakly Informative Priors: What you should be doing when you think you want to use noninformative priors.

P-values and U-values: They're different.

Conservatism: In statistics, the desire to use methods that have been used before.

WWJD: What I think of when I'm stuck on an applied statistics problem.

Theoretical and Applied Statisticians, how to tell them apart: A theoretical statistician calls the data x, an applied statistician says y.

The Fallacy of the One-Sided Bet: Pascal's wager, lottery tickets, and the rest.

Alabama First: Howard Wainer's term for the common error of plotting in alphabetical order rather than based on some more informative variable.

The USA Today Fallacy: Counting all states (or countries) equally, forgetting that many more people live in larger jurisdictions, and so you're ignoring millions and millions of Californians if you give their state the same space you give Montana and Delaware.

Second-Order Availability Bias: Generalizing from correlations you see in your personal experience to correlations in the population.

The "All Else Equal" Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it's not gonna be.

I know there are a bunch I'm forgetting; can youall refresh my memory, please? Thanks.

P.S. No, I don't think I can ever match Stephen Senn in the definitions game."

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