Andrew Gelman Quotes

United States, Statistician
February 11, 1965

Andrew Gelman is an American statistician, professor of statistics and political science, and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He earned an S.B. in mathematics and in physics from MIT in 1986 and a Ph.D. in statistics from Harvard University in 1990 under the supervision of Donald Rubin.

Also known as Professor, Political Scientist

Authors of published papers and editors of scientific journals can, unfortunately, be slow to come to terms with criticism, and it's good that we can use blogs to express specific criticisms of published articles and to use social media to disseminate these criticisms.

Andrew Gelman
People are rational and respond to incentives. Behavior that looks irrational is actually completely rational once you think like an economist.

Andrew Gelman

People are irrational and they need economists, with their open minds, to show them how to be rational and efficient.

Andrew Gelman
I just want to help people do better research.

Andrew Gelman
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If someone does a study which, for statistical reasons, I think is hopelessly underpowered or nonidentified, my best and most useful advice will not be tips on how to calculate p-values better, or how to construct an explanation for some particular data pattern. Rather, my advice will be to start over, to reconsider what you think you already know, maybe to question some prominent work in your subfield, and quite possibly to think a lot harder about measurement, and about the relation of your data to your underlying constructs of interest.

Andrew Gelman
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- Relation