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description= 15 posts published by Lars Syll during June 2018;
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show that they do not only hold under ceteris paribus conditions and a fortiori only are of limited value to our understanding explanations or predictions of real economic systems our admiration for technical virtuosity should not blind us to the fact that we have to have a cautious attitude towards probabilistic inferences in economic contexts we should look out for causal relations but econometrics can never be more than a starting point in that endeavour since econometric statistical explanations are not explanations in terms of mechanisms powers capacities or causes firmly stuck in an empiricist tradition econometrics is only concerned with the measurable aspects of reality but there is always the possibility that there are other variables of vital importance and although perhaps unobservable and non additive not necessarily epistemologically inaccessible that were not considered for the model those who were can hence never be guaranteed to be more than potential causes and not real causes a rigorous application of econometric methods in economics really presupposes that the phenomena of our real world economies are ruled by stable causal relations between variables a perusal of the leading econom etr ic journals shows that most econometricians still concentrate on fixed parameter models and that parameter values estimated in specific spatio temporal contexts are presupposed to be exportable to totally different contexts to warrant this assumption one however has to convincingly establish that the targeted acting causes are stable and invariant so that they maintain their parametric status after the bridging the endemic lack of predictive success of the econometric project indicates that this hope of finding fixed parameters is a hope for which there really is no other ground than hope itself real world social systems are not governed by stable causal mechanisms or capacities the kinds of laws and relations that econometrics has established are laws and relations about entities in models that presuppose causal mechanisms being atomistic and additive when causal mechanisms operate in real world systems they only do it in ever changing and unstable combinations where the whole is more than a mechanical sum of parts if economic regularities obtain they do it as a rule only because we engineered them for that purpose outside man made nomological machines they are rare or even non existent unfortunately that also makes most of the achievements of econometrics as most of the contemporary endeavours of mainstream economic theoretical modelling rather useless no matter how often you call your pet cat a dog it is still nothing but a cat share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky uncertainty heuristics 27 jun 2018 at 09 56 posted in theory of science methodology comments off on uncertainty heuristics animal cruelty and human dignity 26 jun 2018 at 17 09 posted in politics society 1 comment throughout european history the idea of the human being has been expressed in contradistinction to the animal the latter s lack of reason is the proof of human dignity so insistently and unanimously has this antithesis been recited that few other ideas are so fundamental to western anthropology the antithesis is acknowledged even today the behaviorists only appear to have forgotten it that they apply to human beings the same formulae and results which they wring without restraint from defenseless animals in their abominable physiological laboratories proclaims the difference in especially subtle way the conclusion they draw from the mutilated animal bodies applies not to animals in freedom but to human beings today by mistreating animals they announce that they and only they in the whole of creation function voluntarily in the same mechanical blind automatic way the twitching movements of the bound victims made use of by the expert in this world liberated from appearance in which human beings having forfeited reflection have become once more the cleverest animals which subjugate the rest of the universe when they happen not to be tear ing themselves apart to show concern for animals is considered no longer merely sentimental but a betrayal of progress so much for statistical objectivity 26 jun 2018 at 15 39 posted in statistics econometrics 4 comments last year we recruited 29 teams of researchers and asked them to answer the same research question with the same data set teams approached the data with a wide array of analytical techniques and obtained highly varied results all teams were given the same large data set collected by a sports statistics firm across four major football leagues it included referee calls counts of how often referees encountered each player and player demographics including team position height and weight it also included a rating of players skin colour of the 29 teams 20 found a statistically significant correlation between skin colour and red cards findings varied enormously from a slight and non significant tendency for referees to give more red cards to light skinned players to a strong trend of giving more red cards to dark skinned players had any one of these 29 analyses come out as a single peer reviewed publication the conclusion could have ranged from no race bias in referee decisions to a huge bias raphael silberzahn eric uhlmann research that strongly underlines that even in statistics the researcher has many degrees of freedom in statistics as in economics and econometrics the results we get depend on the assumptions we make in our models changing those assumptions playing a more important role than the data we feed into our models leed to far reaching changes in our conclusions using statistics is no guarantee we get at any objective truth share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky take full responsibility for your life 26 jun 2018 at 10 14 posted in varia comments off on take full responsibility for your life never give in never give up lying with statistics 25 jun 2018 at 19 25 posted in statistics econometrics comments off on lying with statistics nonsense is nonsense 25 jun 2018 at 16 32 posted in economics 3 comments the conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed that it is rash to employ men and that it is financially sound to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an indefinite period is crazily improbable the sort of thing which no man could believe who had not had his head fuddled with nonsense for years and years our main task therefore will be to confirm the reader s instinct that what seems sensible is sensible and what seems nonsense is nonsense we shall try to show him that the conclusion that if new forms of employment are offered more men will be employed is as obvious as it sounds and contains no hidden snags that to set unemployed men to work on useful tasks does what it appears to do namely increases the national wealth and that the notion that we shall for intricate reasons ruin ourselves financially if we use this means to increase our well being is what it looks like a bogy john maynard keynes 1929 share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky brave women 25 jun 2018 at 15 50 posted in politics society comments off on brave women courage is a capability to confront fear as when in front of the powerful and mighty not to step back but stand up for one s rights not to be humiliated or abused courage is to do the right thing in spite of danger and fear to keep on even if opportunities to turn back are given dignity a better life or justice and rule of law are things worth fighting for not to step back in spite of confronting the mighty and powerful creates courageous acts that stay in our memories and means something as when this iranian woman refuses to be harassed by self appointed moral guardians the american descent 24 jun 2018 at 12 57 posted in politics society comments off on the american descent the speed of america s moral descent under donald trump is breathtaking in a matter of months we ve gone from a nation that stood for life liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages what s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it s not a response to any actual problem the mass influx of murderers and rapists that trump talks about the wave of crime committed by immigrants here and in his mind refugees in germany are things that simply aren t happening they re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities and you know what this reminds me of the history of anti semitism a tale of prejudice fueled by myths and hoaxes that ended in genocide paul krugman share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky on the limits of mediation analysis and statistical causality 23 jun 2018 at 23 18 posted in statistics econometrics 5 comments mediation analysis is this thing where you have a treatment and an outcome and you re trying to model how the treatment works how much does it directly affect the outcome and how much is the effect mediated through intermediate variables in the real world it s my impression that almost all the mediation analyses that people actually fit in the social and medical sciences are misguided lots of examples where the assumptions aren t clear and where in any case coefficient estimates are hopelessly noisy and where confused people will over interpret statistical significance more and more i ve been coming to the conclusion that the standard causal inference paradigm is broken so how to do it i don t think traditional path analysis or other multivariate methods of the throw all the data in the blender and let god sort em out variety will do the job instead we need some structure and some prior information andrew gelman causality in social sciences and economics can never solely be a question of statistical inference causality entails more than predictability and to really in depth explain social phenomena require theory analysis of variation the foundation of all econometrics can never in itself reveal how these variations are brought about first when we are able to tie actions processes or structures to the statistical relations detected can we say that we are getting at relevant explanations of causation most facts have many different possible alternative explanations but we want to find the best of all contrastive since all real explanation takes place relative to a set of alternatives explanations so which is the best explanation many scientists influenced by statistical reasoning think that the likeliest explanation is the best explanation but the likelihood of x is not in itself a strong argument for thinking it explains y i would rather argue that what makes one explanation better than another are things like aiming for and finding powerful deep causal features and mechanisms that we have warranted and justified reasons to believe in statistical especially the variety based on a bayesian epistemology reasoning generally has no room for these kinds of explanatory considerations the only thing that matters is the probabilistic relation between evidence and hypothesis that is also one of the main reasons i find abduction inference to the best explanation a better description and account of what constitute actual scientific reasoning and inferences in the social sciences regression is used to discover relationships or to disentangle cause and effect however investigators have only vague ideas as to the relevant variables and their causal order functional forms are chosen on the basis of convenience or familiarity serious problems of measurement are often encountered regression may offer useful ways of summarizing the data and making predictions investigators may be able to use summaries and predictions to draw substantive conclusions however i see no cases in which regression equations let alone the more complex methods have succeeded as engines for discovering causal relationships david freedman some statisticians and data scientists think that algorithmic formalisms somehow give them access to causality that is however simply not true assuming convenient things like faithfulness or stability is not to give proofs it s to assume what has to be proven deductive axiomatic methods used in statistics do no produce evidence for causal inferences the real causality we are searching for is the one existing in the real world around us if there is no warranted connection between axiomatically derived theorems and the real world well then we haven t really obtained the causation we are looking for if contributions made by statisticians to the understanding of causation are to be taken over with advantage in any specific field of inquiry then what is crucial is that the right relationship should exist between statistical and subject matter concerns the idea of causation as consequential manipulation is apt to research that can be undertaken primarily through experimental methods and especially to practical science where the central concern is indeed with the consequences of performing particular acts the development of this idea in the context of medical and agricultural research is as understandable as the development of that of causation as robust dependence within applied econometrics however the extension of the manipulative approach into sociology would not appear promising other than in rather special circumstances the more fundamental difficulty is that under the highly anthropocentric principle of no causation without manipulation the recognition that can be given to the action of individuals as having causal force is in fact peculiarly limited john h goldthorpe to save europe we have to abandon the euro 23 jun 2018 at 12 30 posted in economics 9 comments the euro crisis is far from over the tough austerity measures imposed in the eurozone has made economy after economy contract and it has not only made things worse in the periphery countries but also in countries like france and germany alarming facts that should be taken seriously the problems created to a large extent by the euro may not only endanger our economies but also our democracy itself how much whipping can democracy take how many more are going to get seriously hurt and ruined before we end this madness and scrap the euro the european idea or better ideology notwithstanding the euro has split europe in two as the engine of an ever closer union the currency s balance sheet has been disastrous norway and switzerland will not be joining the eu any time soon britain is actively considering leaving it altogether sweden and ...
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