Yael Grauer — Staggering Variety of Clandestine Trackers Found In Popular Android Apps

You are the product.

The Intercept
Staggering Variety of Clandestine Trackers Found In Popular Android Apps
Yael Grauer

Andrew Gelman — Publish your raw data and your speculations, then let other people do the analysis: track and field edition

There seems to be an expectation in science that the people who gather a dataset should also be the ones who analyze it. But often that doesn’t make sense: what it takes to gather relevant data has little to do with what it takes to perform a reasonable analysis. Indeed, the imperatives of analysis can even impede data-gathering, if people have confused ideas of what they can and can’t do with their data.

I’d like us to move to a world in which gathering and analysis of data are separated, in which researchers can get full credit for putting together a useful dataset, without the expectation that they perform a serious analyses. I think that could get around some research bottlenecks.

It’s my impression that this is already done in many areas of science—for example, there are public datasets on genes, and climate, and astronomy, and all sorts of areas in which many teams of researchers are studying common datasets. And in social science we have the NES, GSS, NLSY, etc. Even silly things like the Electoral Integrity Project—I don’t think these data are so great, but I appreciate the open spirit under which these data are shared....

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Publish your raw data and your speculations, then let other people do the analysis: track and field edition
Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center, Columbia University

Derek Thompson — What the Death of Homepages Means for the Future of News

Why should the death of homepages give rise to news that's more about us? Because homepages reflect the values of institutions, and Facebook and Twitter reflect the interest of individual readers. These digital grazers have shown again and again that they aren't interested in hard news, but rather entertainment, self-help, awe, and outrage dressed up news. Digitally native publishers are pretty good at pumping this kind of stuff out.... Even serious publishing companies know that self-help and entertainment often outperform outstanding reporting.

Second, we should expect—and have already seen—an expedited clustering effect around news tropes, and this clustering is making news organizations more like each other.

The Atlantic
What the Death of Homepages Means for the Future of News
Derek Thompson

Lars P. Syll — Mainstream macroeconomics — a massive intellectual mistake [GIGO]

...the root of our problem goes much deeper. It ultimately goes back to how we look upon the data we are handling. In “modern” macroeconomics – dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, new synthesis, new-classical and new-Keynesian – variables are treated as if drawn from a known “data-generating process” that unfolds over time and on which we therefore have access to heaps of historical time-series. If we do not assume that we know the “data-generating process” – if we do not have the “true” model – the whole edifice collapses. And of course it has to. I mean, who really honestly believes that we should have access to this mythical Holy Grail, the data-generating process?...

...as Keynes convincingly argued in his monumental Treatise on Probability (1921), this is not always possible. Often we simply do not know. We cannot always put exact numbers on the assessments we make. There are no given probability distributions we can appeal to.

In the end this is what it all boils down to. We all know that many activities, relations, processes and events are genuinely uncertain. The data do not unequivocally single out one decision as the only “rational” one. Neither the economist, nor the deciding individual, can fully pre-specify how people will decide when facing uncertainties and ambiguities that are ontological facts of the way the world works.

GIGO.

This is a key problem with formalism. According to the scientific method, an explanation is true if and only if it fits all the facts it purports to explain. In magical thinking, an explanation is presumed true if it fits selected facts that are chosen based on methodological convenience or ideological assumptions. That is to say, the assumptions serve to prove the explanation, which is the fallacy of circular reasoning.

Mainstream macroeconomics — a massive intellectual mistake
Lars P. Syll | Professor of Civics, Faculty of Education and Society, Malmö University