In the world of stats blogging, there are few sites older and more respected than Andrew Gelman’s Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference. As far as I can tell it’s been going since about 2004, which in internet time makes it about 100. It’s been said that the scariest seven words in academia are “Andrew Gelman just blogged about your paper“.
Back in 2019, I had my own version of that heart attack when I got a notification on my phone this site was getting a huge influx of traffic1 and discovered that Andrew Gelman had linked to one of my posts. I was actually at my brother’s wedding and I had to go hide in a bathroom to immediately check what had happened, terrified that I was about to be ripped to shreds.
Thankfully it was nothing to cry about. Basically someone else’s post had gone viral ripping popular reporting on that blinded orchestra study to shreds, and he used my 2017 post to show that the evidence the viral article was presenting wasn’t new and was pretty clearly presented in the paper itself. He called my take “careful” and didn’t seem to have any disagreement with my take. Not the highest of praise, but given who we’re talking about, I was walking on air.
This all came back to me this week when I discovered he recently put up a post about the problems of media manipulation in criminal trials in a post titled with a quote “In the run-up to the trial, the brothers conducted an elaborate public relations campaign . . . also arranged for payments to influencers and podcasters who made sympathetic social media posts about the case.”
Oh gee, people do that? You don’t say.
He goes on to explain the connection he’s seeing between science criticism and criminal trial manipulation:
We can laugh at buffoonish Epstein associates such as Nobel-winner Richard “Axel” Foley and Ted-talk star Dan “Redhead” Ariely, but this seems worse. Convicted sex offenders enlist legal associate of convicted sex offender to solicit a pardon from a convicted sex offender. There is a logic to it, I admit.“
And:
As I wrote a few years ago: Yes, this is a credulous age. But this credulity does not occur in a vacuum. What’s stunning is the way in which frauds can stay afloat even after they’ve been exposed. Not that this is new. That Chariots of the Gods guy kept selling books even after it was common knowledge that it was all bogus. I just think we need to keep more of an eye on the active efforts that people take, not just to promote crap, but to attack those who point out the problems.
Bolding mine.
I’ve pointed out problems in science and data communication for years, and those I know in real life, family, friends and acquaintances, generally thought this was somewhat interesting, if a bit boring. I have never been attacked more viciously or angrily in real life than when I pointed out how specific criminal defendants were manipulating our media system.
I still have no explanation for the level of reaction I got, as I’m not a person who shies away from controversial topics at baseline. I talked to someone recently who spent years dealing with sovereign citizens and noted she found more reasonable people there than in true crime.
Either way, welcome to the party Andrew Gelman, we need you.
- I just checked and this one link is still my 11th highest source of traffic all time. I still get hits from it, 7 years later. ↩︎
