mathbabe

> You didn't really address the examples which mschuster91 provided and that's important to understanding the problem:

On the contrary, I addressed it entirely. mschuster91 seems to be under the impression that the teacher evaluation schemes boil down to nothing but the simplest possible before-after comparison of grades of students, ignoring all issues of demographics, differing student quality, differing school circumstances, etc. Such a scheme is indeed absurd, as his counterexample proves, but it is not what has been proposed by pretty much everyone! The actual proposals are well aware of what he thinks is the fatal problem, and go to often elaborate lengths to model and adjust for these sorts of heterogeneities in order to quantify the value-added of a particular teacher. The problem is recognized, included, and mostly dealt with. Whether the solution works entirely or is worthwhile is unclear, but he's arguing against a strawman.

> One estimate has ~12% of NYC public school teachers being punished by the flawed VAM in use there:

So I've looked at http://mathbabe.org/2015/04/02/the-arbitrary-punishment-of-new-york-teacher-evaluations/ and I have zero idea what she is trying to show. She assumes independence and treats it as a coin flip. Ummm.... what? With that sort of logic, you could show no one could expect to score a 1600 on the SAT. When criticized she links to a real analysis†, which shows considerable non-independence which means her numbers are wrong and…

After reading these other comments, I Googled David E. Shaw and found this: http://mathbabe.org/2012/04/05/it-sucks-to-be-rich/. (WARNING: Not sure of the validity of these stories, but they're interesting.)

> First example: David hires a Ph.D. in English literature (he has a thing for “geniuses”, even in the mail room) to test mattresses for him. So that person’s job is to sleep on 15 different mattresses, for 8 nights each, and draw up a report to tell him the pros and cons of each mattress. This is to avoid him having an uncomfy night’s sleep. That’s what the risk was that we were avoiding with that.

> Second example: David wants to be sure his trip to California goes smoothly, so he hires a Ph.D. in Something to take the exact same trip – same car service to the NY airport, same flight (same seat on plane!), same car service upon arrival, same hotel, exactly a week before his trip (due to understood seasonality issues of air travel) – to make sure there are no snags, and to draw up the report that presumable explains how much leg room there was in his plane.

As an aside, their research group encouraged me to apply for a position shortly before I graduated college. The application asked for things like SAT/ACT scores and (number of) lines of code written in various languages. I thought my application looked pretty good, but I guess my ACT score was too low for them to consider me (even potentially!) brilliant. I still feel kind of bitter about that.

Of course science is political. What isn't?

I have a feeling that non-scientists see science as an invisible ethereal, platonic construct that's slowly being unveiled by hardy explorers, uh I mean scientists, until at last the whole of the Truth and nothing but the Truth fully shines in its enlightening splendor.

Except that's not how it works. In practice, science works by scientific consensus. What is true is what the community decides is true. The community can be convinced otherwise by contradicting evidence (or not) but the process of convincing is then subject to all the biases affecting our feeble human minds: it can be contradictory with other evidence, misinterpreted, misunderstood, deemed insufficient, coming from the wrong person, etc. It takes a lot of time for the consensus to evolve, and it's a rather a messy and political affair. There's often a running joke that a theory's acceptance depends on the old guard dying out and being replaced by the younger, more open-minded generation (relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/how-math-works)

Btw, just in case you're wondering, math is absolutely not immune from this either. Cathy O'Neil wrote an excellent post detailing how mathematical proofs work in real life (and not in some platonic imaginary world invented by laymen):
https://mathbabe.org/2012/08/06/what-is-a-proof/ also with a relatively recent example: https://mathbabe.org/2012/11/14/the-abc-conjecture-has-not-been-proved/

> There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist.

I don't know where you read that but you really, really, really need to learn about that book before repeating it, much less complaining about the lack of intellectual conversation.

Cathy O'Neil has a Ph.D in mathematics (https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=38230), worked as a quant, and most definitely is not claiming that math is racist. Rather, she's talking about how MISUSING math – and especially machine learning – can reinforce biases which were already present or introduced by sampling error. She's actually calling for greater mathematical understanding so people keep these things in mind and avoid them:

http://www.npr.org/2016/09/12/493654950/weapons-of-math-destruction-outlines-dangers-of-relying-on-data-analytics

https://mathbabe.org/2014/08/12/weapon-of-math-destruction-risk-based-sentencing-models/

"Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude. Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and even championed by those who find it conducive to success."

This is def consistent my personal experience... Not so much sexism (nowadays at least) but a strange mix of ageism, cult of innate 'genius', and gymnastics/ballet-like, endurance/bravado-focused ultracompetitiveness [1,2,3]. I increasingly blame Hardy's bestseller --and his abiding influence on mathematics culture worldwide-- for it.

(Also I can't believe such a diss was accepted in the first place... Sign of changing times.)

[1] https://mathbabe.org/2014/08/15/i-love-math-and-i-hate-the-fields-medal/

[2] http://listeningtogolem.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-invisible-pachyderm-ageism-in.html

[3] https://mathbabe.org/2015/01/16/representation-of-women-and-the-genius-myth/

Also has a great list of other blogs, most of which are my favorites now too.

https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/04/09/some-of-my-favorite-blogs/

here's a copy+pastable list:
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/
http://danluu.com/
https://aphyr.com/
http://www.elidedbranches.com/
http://composition.al/blog/2015/03/31/what-isnt-a-key-value-store/
https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2016/03/29/0
http://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/intro.html
http://blog.jessitron.com/2015/06/ultratestable-coding-style.html
http://akaptur.com/blog/2014/08/03/getting-started-with-python-internals/
http://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/post/142387131042/nodejs-left-pad
http://embedded.fm/blog/takingaparttoys
http://gigasquidsoftware.com/blog/2012/09/20/7-john-mccarthy-papers-in-7-weeks-1/
https://mathbabe.org/2016/03/30/apple-vs-fbi-nobody-won/