Weiye Loh's Library tagged Generalization → View Popular, Search in Google

Jan

2012

Needed: More Political Dimensions - NYTimes.com

One dimension — left to right — doesn’t suffice to deal with today’s political reality.

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...eded-more-political-dimensions

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Politics Essentialism Generalization

Use the left-to-right dimension for a candidate’s opinion about the appropriate level of government involvement in ownership and regulation of the means of production, and the distribution of goods and money.
Use the up and down (“high” and “low”) dimension for commitment to the Bill of Rights, high for the most, low for the least.
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- Use the third dimension, in front of or behind the surface of a piece of paper or a computer screen, for foreign policy. Behind for isolationist (“iso”), in front for interventionist (“inter”).

Jul

2011

The Fundamentalist Stereotype: A Vindication, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

Yesterday my colleague Larry Iannaccone, the world's leading expert on the Economics of Religion, gave a provocative lecture on Christian fundamentalism. His thesis: Almost all the stereotypes about this group are false. Now I'm one of those people who believes that stereotypes are usually true statistical generalizations, so naturally I was skeptical.

To check my suspicions, I turned to the General Social Survey.

econlog.econlib.org/...the_fundamental.html

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Religion Stereotype Generalization Statistics Data

Bottom line: Larry hastily dismisses a stereotype that is basically sound. Critics of fundamentalism may be exaggerating, but the patterns they point to are real.
Generalizations are outside statistics, just as any effort to explain (i.e. to come to corroborated or otherwise plausibly argued conclusions) is.
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- Do you think that "true statistical generalizations" have recently (say in the last 100 years) converged toward some gravitational centre of truth? Are the stereotypes of, say, 17th century science less indicative of truth than modern stereotypes? If not, why are they different - if yes, what has happened in the meantime to make people produce "better"/true(er) stereotypes?
- Very often I find: the more sophisticated the statistical approach taken, the easier practioners forget that valid conclusions lie outside of statistics - what makes matters worse (broadening the realm of abuse), a lot of people consider very simple statistics highly sophisticated.