Skepticism about beautiful people having more daughters.

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/07/how_should_unpr.html

by lliiffee • 17 years ago

43 9 17 years ago

stat.columbia.edu

philwelch2• 17 years ago

It's great to have what effectively amounts to a rebuttal on the front page at the same time as the article it disputes.

jimmybot• 17 years ago

I find it great that on HN, new links are often relevant to recently, previously discussed links. You can almost see the collective mind digesting new information and putting out new conjectures.

Still, I wonder if there would be a good system for showing two stories are related, because although I frequently check HN, I don't always keep up and some stories really need the context of the previous story.

tokenadult3• 17 years ago

I wonder if there would be a good system for showing two stories are related

I believe that is called a hyperlink, as here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=726421

Hyperlinks generalize to showing that three or more stories are related, and allow annotations (by accompanying text) to show the nature of the relationship. Here, I can make clear that the thread to which I post this reply links out to an article that refutes the article linked out to in the link

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=726421

I have just provided to another HN discussion thread.

Hypertext is wonderful.

snewe• 17 years ago

This letter:

http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/kana...

effectively shows that the original paper ignored endogeneity, mis-interpreted coefficient estimates and data-mined.

Tichy• 17 years ago

I think most people try a variety of things in their life, eventually hit on something that yields good returns, and then milk it for all it's worth. So that "beautiful daughters" guy has found a gold mine. Who cares about science - tell people what they want to hear, and what they can use to chat on parties, and you can make lots of money. (Not only selling books, but also getting grants and invitations to universities, no doubt).

With that thesis the author can get famous, where is his incentive to be honest about it?

I am waiting for the corresponding articles to appear in all major magazines in my country (presented as established fact, of course). It just makes for too good a story to pass on it.

Ardit20• 17 years ago

With that thesis the author can get famous, where is his incentive to be honest about it?

Well, this article is about a scientist, or statistician, alleging that the results are "speculation". She is being polite of course and in the scientific lingo she is probably saying that he is a fraud. So that is his incentive, he can be honest and find a "true" goldmine, or gamble and either go to the top or sink to the bottom.

Skepticism about beautiful people having more daughters.

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