https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/12/01/russells-paradox-of-ghostwriters/ Skip to primary content Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Search [ ] [Search] Main menu * Home * Authors * Blogs We Read * Sponsors Post navigation Effective Number of Parameters in a Statistical Model On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpreted Russell's Paradox of ghostwriters Posted on December 1, 2023 7:42 AM by Andrew A few months ago we discussed the repulsive story of a [DEL:UCLA:DEL] USC professor who took full credit for a series of books that were ghostwritten, so much so that when it turned out that one of the books had "at least 95 separate passages" of plagiarism, including "long sections of a chapter on the cardiac health of giraffes." You'd think you'd remember a chapter on the cardiac health of giraffes. Indeed, if I hired someone to write a chapter under my name on the cardiac health of giraffes, I think I'd read it, just out of curiosity! But I guess this guy has no actual curiosity. He just wants another bestselling book so he can go on TV some more and mingle with rich and famous people. OK, I've ranted enough about this guy. What I wanted to share today is a fascinating story from a magazine article about the affair, where the author, Joel Stein, "Nearly all experts and celebrities use ghostwriters," and then links to an amusing magazine article from 2009 subtitled, "If Sarah Palin can write a memoir in four months, can I write my life story in an afternoon?": When I heard that Sarah Palin wrote her upcoming 400-page autobiography, Going Rogue: An American Life, in four months, I thought, What took her so long? To prove that introspection doesn't need to be time-consuming, I decided to try to write my memoir in one day. Since Palin had a ghostwriter, I figured it was only fair that I have help too, so I called Neil Strauss, who co-wrote the best-selling memoirs of Marilyn Manson, Motley Crue, Dave Navarro and Jenna Jameson. . . . The whole article is fun. They wrote a whole memoir in an afternoon! That particular memoir-book was a gag, but it got me thinking of this general idea of recursive writing. A writer hiring a ghostwriter . . . what a great idea! Of course this happens all the time when the writer is a brand name, as with James Patterson. But then what if Patterson's ghostwriter is busy and hires a ghostwriter of his own . . . Perhaps the most famous ghostwritten book is The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Alex Haley. After Roots came out, the Malcom X autobiography was promoted heavily based on the Haley authorship. On the other hand, parts of Roots were plagiarized, which is kind of like a ghostwriter hiring a ghostwriter. A writer hiring a writer to do his writing . . . that sounds so funny! But should it? I'm a professional writer and I call upon collaborators all the time. Collaborative writing is very rare in literary writing; it sometimes happens in nonliterary writing (for example here, or for a less successful example, here), but usually there it follows a model of asymmetric collaboration, as with Freakonomics where Levitt supplied the material, Dubner supplied the writing, but I assume that both the content and the writing benefited from conversations between the authors. One of the common effects of ghostwriting is to give a book a homogenized style. Writers of their own books will have their original styles--most of us cannot approach the caliber of Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, or Jim Thompson, but style is part of how you express yourself--and nonprofessional writers can have charming idiosyncratic styles of their own. The homogenized, airport-biography style comes from writers who are talented enough to produce this sort of thing on demand, while having some financial motivation not to express originality. In contrast, Malcolm Gladwell deserves credit for producing readable prose while having his own interesting style. I doubt he uses a ghostwriter. Every once in awhile, though, there will be a ghostwriter who adds compelling writing of his own. One example is the aforementioned Alex Haley; another is the great Leonard Shecter. I'd say Stephen Dubner too, but I see him as more of a collaborator than a hired gun. Also Ralph Leighton: much of the charm in the Feynman memoirs is that voice, and you gotta give the ghostwriter some of the credit here, even if only to keep that voice as is and not replace it with generic prose. There must be some other ghostwriters who added style rather than blandness, although I can't think of any examples right now. More generally, I remain interested in the idea that collaboration is so standard in academic writing (even when we are writing fiction) and so unusual elsewhere, with the exception of ghostwriting. This entry was posted in Literature by Andrew. Bookmark the permalink . 31 thoughts on "Russell's Paradox of ghostwriters" 1. [9d6b69f8]Hernan Bruno on December 1, 2023 8:04 AM at 8:04 am said: If ghostwriters keep hiring ghostwriters, would the book converge to the most plain-vanilla book ever? Or would it diverge wildly, with each additional ghostwriter adding diverging elements? A boring research question that nobody should pursue because who cares: can we use LLMs to see which characteristics make the message diverge and when does it converge? Reply | + [42d6]Dale Lehman on December 1, 2023 9:13 AM at 9:13 am said: Or just use the LLM to ghost write to begin with. I see no reason you can't ask an LLM to write a story in the style of X or in the style of a ghost writer writing on behalf of X, or..... In fact, many people have done just that, at least for short pieces of writing. Luckily it is still possible to recognize many of these attempts - the more glaring ones are actually somewhat entertaining. I wonder how many professional ghost writers are already relying on Chat GPT. Reply | o [8d15]KT2 on December 1, 2023 8:13 PM at 8:13 pm said: "make the message diverge and when does it converge?" Does this count as a ghost in the shell speaker? "This dev conference organizer seems addicted to making up women / Eduards Sizovs, the organizer behind the Devternity and JDKon developer conferences, admitted that at least one woman speaker's profile was 'auto-generated.' https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/28/23978254/ devternity-jdkon-developer-conference-fake-women-speakers Yes. Transcript coming soon. See sport and finance 'news'. And colorwashing diversity via plagiarized training set. Reply | 2. [d7e3e90d]paul alper on December 1, 2023 10:05 AM at 10:05 am said: Ghostwriters are common enough, but how abut ghost colleagues? Cyril Burt not only invented the ANOVA data (regarding twins separated at birth) but also the women, Miss Margaret Howard and Miss Jane Conway, who supposedly did the tedious, pre-computer calculations. See the following to get a fuller picture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Burt Reply | 3. [42292509]Daniel Lakeland on December 1, 2023 10:05 AM at 10:05 am said: He was a USC professor not UCLA! USC is much much better at scandals and fundraising than UCLA... It's the only things they do well. (I'm a USC alum) Reply | + [d7e3]paul alper on December 1, 2023 10:44 AM at 10:44 am said: Daniel Lakeland: I found this regarding a photo-shopping neuroscience scandal at USC https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/ usc-has-been-rocked-by-allegations-of-research-fraud-against-a-neuroscientist-heres-what-happened /ar-AA1kQrPN Photoshopping software was invented around 1987 and is also responsible for scandals in neuroscience at Stanford (president resigns but still a member on the faculty), Ohio State, and Johns Hopkins (Nobel Prize winner implicated). In my view, the Harvard flap regarding Francesca Gino's behavioral science publications, seems trivial in comparison. Reply | o [836c]Raphael K on December 1, 2023 2:54 PM at 2:54 pm said: This scandal has been mentioned before, in a comment on the second David Agus plagiarism blog post. Posted by Daniel Lakeland: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/11/22/ in-all-seriousness-whats-usc-gonna-do-about-its-plagiarizing-professor /#comment-2288099 Reply | + [d582]Andrew on December 1, 2023 6:32 PM at 6:32 pm said: My east coast bias that I get USC and UCLA confused. Reply | + [0ed4]Raghuveer Parthasarath on December 4, 2023 10:55 PM at 10:55 pm said: Here's one to add to the USC list: "University of Southern California social work students just sued the school..." for misleading claims. https://www.businessinsider.com/ usc-lawsuit-misrepresenting-social-work-program-massive-student-loan-debt-2023-5 -- whether it's fraud, sleaziness, or simply taking advantage of terrible choices made by Master's students is up for debate. Reply | o [d582]Andrew on December 5, 2023 7:10 AM at 7:10 am said: Raghu: More background from this L.A. Times article: The complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court alleges that USC did not inform students that many components of the online master's of social work degree are outsourced to a for-profit education company, 2U Inc., and that USC splits the tuition revenue with its publicly traded partner. Although USC has marketed the online option as "the same" as the on-campus counterpart, the virtual program's instructors, curriculum, internship placement and other services have been different -- and inferior, the lawsuit asserts. . . . The venture with 2U made USC's social work school the largest in the country, with the student body growing from about 900 in 2010 to 3,500 in 2016. Tuition climbed to $115,000 by 2021. . . . Hiring instructors and staff proved costly and, the lawsuit alleges, their quality is not the same as those working in the on-campus program. An almost entirely different group of instructors, who do not otherwise work for USC and are not part of the "world-class" permanent research faculty, conduct the online instruction, the lawsuit alleges. . . . Don't worry, not all of USC's permanent faculty are world-class! The LA Times article continues: Other problems began to mount. USC signed up for pricey office space in a downtown L.A. high-rise. More affordable master's degree programs came on the market, including Cal State Northridge's two-year online program, which charges $46,000. USC pushed to fill online classes with more students, which led to the admission of less-qualified students and aggressive recruiting practices -- which further diminished the learning experience and the social work program's overall reputation, The Times has reported. And this hilarious bit: The training material allegedly included graphics that depict a Black woman labeled "Needy Nelly" who had trouble with the application, needed "high touch" hand-holding, and was rated as the most likely to enroll. "Confirmed Carmen," a Latina, was also rated with a high probability for enrollment. But "Money Molly" -- a "very intelligent" white woman -- was considered a tough recruit. Reply | 4. [42292509]Daniel Lakeland on December 1, 2023 10:10 AM at 10:10 am said: Also I like that Kareem put his collaborator on the author list for his Sherlock Holmes fiction. They got better as they went along. I suspect Kareem had some good ideas and wrote a lot of the first book then his author collaborator polished it. In the second and third book I'm guessing she was involved from the start and so they were more polished. They're good books, so I'm glad they got together and did them. Reply | 5. [0ed444b0]Raghu Parthasarathy on December 1, 2023 1:04 PM at 1:04 pm said: The thing that's appalling about ghostwriting is that the writer's name is absent; it's basically plagiarism on the part of the named author. In contrast to the ghostwritten books by famous or infamous authors, there are books in which the well known person and the other person -- presumably the writer doing most of the actual writing -- share authorship. As an example, George Church's and Ed Regis' "Regenesis." (A mediocre book; not recommended.) I've wondered why the authors who hire ghostwriters don't take this approach. Do they, or the publishers, really think that adding another name to the author list will dissuade people from buying the book? Is the named author really that vain? Reply | + [42d6]Dale Lehman on December 1, 2023 1:44 PM at 1:44 pm said: Yes (to the vanity). Brand dilution is real: https:// pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00852. Actually, all of the literature on brand dilution doesn't exactly map into the ghostwriter phenomenon, but that opens the possibility for a publication to explore it as a new case. Reply | o [0ed4]Raghu Parthasarathy on December 1, 2023 2:00 PM at 2:00 pm said: I thought brand dilution is a company that does X well branching out to do Y, perhaps badly. If so, writing the book is in itself the brand dilution. Naming the ghost writer would perhaps minimize the dilution, since no one is ascribing the writing solely to the famous author. Reply | # [cd8f]Dale Lehman on December 1, 2023 2:15 PM at 2:15 pm said: I did say that brand dilution doesn't map exactly to ghostwriting. But it does have some common features. By definition (at least my definition), ghostwriting is a way to increase the quantity of the brand (why use ghostwriters if not to put out more stuff?). The quality may also be impacted - if it is reduced, it is the brand that will suffer. So, it is a form of dilution, even though it doesn't quite fit the cases that are usually discussed. Still, I do attribute it largely to vanity. + [fdbc]chipmunk on December 2, 2023 9:55 AM at 9:55 am said: I don't see anything appalling about ghostwriting. I don't don't understand why there is an obligation to name the actual writer of a book in particular - but nothing else. Henry Ford's name is still on all of the cars his company makes but he's been dead for 80 years and I glance over at my computer and see the names of two dead people on it and none of the names of the people who actually made it. So why does anyone give a hoot who wrote what article or book? Here's why: so they can attack the person who wrote it rather than the content of the article, book or whatever. It's the same reason the left demands "transparency" in campaign finance: they want to attack the source rather than the content. These days it even means physically attacking the source, as we've seen so vividly recently. Interestingly, when the attacked source strikes back through non-violent means, like black-listing the attackers, that's somehow unfair, and the attackers claim to be entitled to identity protection!! So I guess we're supposed to name the authors when it benefits the people who want them named, but not when it doesn't. That's the left. It fits perfectly in academia, which poses as a meritocracy of ideas but where, in reality, "peer" - AKA "gang" - assessement is the key to success. Reply | o [34bf]somebody on December 2, 2023 9:59 AM at 9:59 am said: Bro you need to get out more Reply | o [42d6]Dale Lehman on December 2, 2023 10:08 AM at 10:08 am said: chipmunk I'm shocked that you don't believe in accountability. If you don't know who wrote something, you don't know who is responsible. But I see it did give you an opportunity to rail against the "left" even though that has nothing to do with the issue. Reply | 6. [9851b6fe]Mark Palko on December 1, 2023 5:30 PM at 5:30 pm said: Neil Strauss... where have we heard that name before? https://observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com/2017/12/ merry-muskmas-to-all.html Reply | 7. [003f4a73]Christopher Paul Heesy on December 1, 2023 5:32 PM at 5:32 pm said: Hi Andrew, As painful as it is to say, but fraud is associated with USC not UCLA. It's a typo. Reply | 8. [67804ec1]Bob Calin-Jageman on December 1, 2023 8:45 PM at 8:45 pm said: Just an interesting FYI that Alexander Dumas invented a type an industrialized ghost writing for his serialized novels. He employed a studio of writers who helped him materialize his ideas. I've heard different versions of how this worked, but by some accounts, his stable of writers had different specializations: some wrote up nothing but scenery, others descriptions, etc-- and he could produce material quickly from the raw materials his studio kept at hand. I think there is debate, though, about the extent to which he relied on ghostwriters. Even after learning about his approach, I still love reading Dumas. And, really, it makes sense as a business mode when someone has a reach/platform but doesn't want to actually do the hard parts. Maybe if they just listed themselves as "producers" it would be a bit more transparent and acceptable? Reply | + [9851]Mark Palko on December 1, 2023 9:14 PM at 9:14 pm said: Dumas once joked to his head collaborator about his latest hit, "How is it? I haven't had a chance to read it yet." (and yes, I too still enjoy Dumas. The fact that it was a group effort doesn't bother me at all.) Reply | + [9ae1]J. David Eisenberg on December 5, 2023 3:22 PM at 3:22 pm said: Somewhat related: "Naked Came the Stranger" by Penelope Ashe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger Reply | 9. [d582b760]Andrew on December 1, 2023 8:58 PM at 8:58 pm said: Interesting! Kinda sounds like Hollywood movie productions. Reply | 10. [8527a035]Sean on December 1, 2023 11:07 PM at 11:07 pm said: On one hand word processors and web apps make it easier to write collectively, on the other hand many novelists and academics from the middle of the last century were husband-and-wife teams with only one (usually the husband) listed as author. Reply | + [d582]Andrew on December 2, 2023 8:57 AM at 8:57 am said: Sean, Good point. Also, back in the day, editors and publishers had much more input, right? When I write a book, I deliver it in finished form to the publisher, who then publishes it, with essentially zero intervention, just some copy editing where they want me to futz around with commas, etc. But back when authors sent in handwritten or typed manuscripts that needed to be set into print anyway, I can well imagine that editors were making all sorts of changes without getting credit. Reply | 11. [268519d0]Jonathan (another one) on December 2, 2023 1:10 AM at 1:10 am said: Has anyone other than Charles Barkley ever claimed to have been misquoted in his autobiography? Reply | + [d582]Andrew on December 2, 2023 8:54 AM at 8:54 am said: Jonathan: It's a good thing that I didn't put any fake Rubin quotes in the second or third editions of Bayesian Data Analysis! Reply | 12. [72c4db58]roger koenker on December 2, 2023 12:17 PM at 12:17 pm said: I'm surprised no one mentioned Courant and Robbins "What is Mathematics" which Courant refused to put Robbins's name on until Robbins threatened to "make a fuss" [Robbins's interview with Warren Page]. Finally, when the paperback appeared Robbins name was added to the title page, but Courant continued to hold the copyright and received the royalties. Reply | 13. [25e4cddd]Phil on December 2, 2023 1:12 PM at 1:12 pm said: There's an impressive set of physics textbooks by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz. It's sometimes said the books contain "not a word of Landau and not a thought of Lifshitz." (That's way too unkind: Lifshitz was a really good physicist and made some important discoveries, I'm sure some of the material is based on his thoughts, maybe most of it. But Landau was one of the greatest physicists of all time, so poor Lifshitz is forever in his shadow). Reply | + [0618]nonrenormalizable on December 2, 2023 2:28 PM at 2:28 pm said: Someone once told me that of the two volumes on String Theory by Green, Schwartz and Witten: "The cover is Green, the letters are Schwartz (black) and it's written by Witten." Reply | Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment * [ ] Name [ ] Email [ ] Website [ ] [Post Comment] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] D[ ] * Art * Bayesian Statistics * Causal Inference * Decision Analysis * Economics * Jobs * Literature * Miscellaneous Science * Miscellaneous Statistics * Multilevel Modeling * Papers * Political Science * Public Health * Sociology * Sports * Stan * Statistical Computing * Statistical Graphics * Teaching * Zombies 1. J. David Eisenberg on Russell's Paradox of ghostwritersDecember 5, 2023 3:22 PM Somewhat related: "Naked Came the Stranger" by Penelope Ashe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Came_the_Stranger 2. Andrew on Modest pre-registrationDecember 5, 2023 1:52 PM Jessica: I guess that a lot of such papers are written, and some even get published, but not in the... 3. Jessica Hullman on Modest pre-registrationDecember 5, 2023 1:41 PM In conjunction with this, less flashy writing could help. I read so many papers where authors are overinterpreting some effect... 4. Anoneuoid on Modest pre-registrationDecember 5, 2023 1:33 PM Nullius in verba. The way to deal with mistrust is multiple people repeating the experiment/observation and testing predictions about the... 5. gec on Modest pre-registrationDecember 5, 2023 1:24 PM This makes me wonder if much of the current "crisis" arises from the difficulty of getting replications published? After all,... 6. John N-G on "Other than when he treated Steve Jobs, Agus, 58, had never been told anything besides that he's awesome . . ."December 5, 2023 1:09 PM The part about being uncomfortable as the focus of any media was clearly written by his ghostwriter, who up to... 7. Jessica Hullman on Modest pre-registrationDecember 5, 2023 1:01 PM Although, I should not have used the word 'certainty' in that sentence. One problem with even this benefit is that... 8. OliP on Modest pre-registrationDecember 5, 2023 12:47 PM "Plus of course the only real benefit we can say with certainty that pre-registration provides is that if one pre-registers,... 9. Anoneuoid on Hey, Taiwan experts! Here's a polling question for you:December 5, 2023 11:41 AM So president-vice president pair CD is running on that ticket. The question is whether the oppostion pair should brun as... 10. psyskeptic on Modest pre-registrationDecember 5, 2023 11:29 AM Sometimes you have to say "first to show" or some such because the field believes it has already been shown.... 11. JDK on Modest pre-registrationDecember 5, 2023 8:39 AM This reminds me of the gap between saying there is access to the data and actually providing access to the... 12. Andrew on Russell's Paradox of ghostwritersDecember 5, 2023 7:10 AM Raghu: More background from this L.A. Times article: The complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court alleges that USC... 13. Raghuveer Parthasarath on Russell's Paradox of ghostwriters December 4, 2023 10:55 PM Here's one to add to the USC list: "University of Southern California social work students just sued the school..." for... 14. chipmunk on Modest pre-registrationDecember 4, 2023 10:45 PM I like your / Shrevan's point about the value of pre-registration for thinking through the methods and procedures to ensure... 15. Fred Mailhot on Computational linguist Bob Carpenter says LLMs are intelligent. Here's why:December 4, 2023 10:34 PM No True Cognitive Science, indeed! As someone who studied linguistics, and computer science, and cognitive science, and has been working... 16. Howard Edwards on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 4, 2023 3:02 PM On the subject of portmanteau words, back in the 1980s Ed Dudewicz of Syracuse University came up with "selestimation" -... 17. Anonymous on Modest pre-registrationDecember 4, 2023 2:49 PM We started out with concerns that statistical tests were not being used appropriately, particularly because researchers were exploring the garden... 18. Raghu Parthasarathy on "Reading Like It's 1965": Fiction as a window into the pastDecember 4, 2023 2:15 PM "Contra Raghu, I do think that reading old books gives us *some* sense of how people used to live" --... 19. Sean on "Reading Like It's 1965": Fiction as a window into the pastDecember 4, 2023 1:42 PM I am pretty sure you don't think about the price of housing, the availability of jobs, or the risk of... 20. Kyle C on "Reading Like It's 1965": Fiction as a window into the pastDecember 4, 2023 1:06 PM In Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (1952), the young female protagonist lives in what would now be considered a... 21. oncodoc on "Reading Like It's 1965": Fiction as a window into the pastDecember 4, 2023 11:21 AM My first reaction is that we are all creatures of our times, but we are often unaware of this. Fish... 22. UserFriendlyyy on "Other than when he treated Steve Jobs, Agus, 58, had never been told anything besides that he's awesome . . ." December 4, 2023 3:30 AM I don't think N. Finkelstein was accusing A. Dershowitz: of not having written his book. He was poking fun at... 23. John Christie on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 3, 2023 9:34 PM I've used these kinds of bars frequently in the past in applied contexts where the client only wants to make... 24. gwern on The rise and fall of Seth Roberts and the Shangri-La dietDecember 3, 2023 6:14 PM Speaking of bipolar, I didn't know what Gelman mentions about Roberts's early struggles in young adulthood/middle-age, and these days, it... 25. Brent M on Genius is not enough: The sad story of Peter Hagelstein, living monument to the sunk-cost fallacyDecember 3, 2023 4:59 PM "...Had Hagelstein kept working on alchemy or a perpetual motion machine or something then I'd subscribe to your "you can't... 26. Kazi Ashrafuzzaman on "Other than when he treated Steve Jobs, Agus, 58, had never been told anything besides that he's awesome . . ."December 3, 2023 3:02 PM You mentioned Alan Dershowitz. He was charged with the same act you incredulously described as "putting your name on a... 27. Noah Motion on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 3, 2023 12:29 PM Leaving an audience perplexed about why an analysis was done at all is, perhaps unfortunately, quite often entirely appropriate. 28. Andrew on EJG Pitman's Notes on Non-Parametric Statistical InferenceDecember 3, 2023 12:14 PM Roger: Regarding the only-of-historical-interest thing, I suspect that some of the problem was that these people were basically mathematicians, and... 29. Jonathan (another one) on EJG Pitman's Notes on Non-Parametric Statistical InferenceDecember 3, 2023 12:12 PM I find the following excerpt delightful: I call this form of test "closed" because in applying it we do not... 30. Roger Koenker on EJG Pitman's Notes on Non-Parametric Statistical InferenceDecember 3, 2023 12:03 PM "historical interest isn't nothing," indeed. Of no historical interest -- that's really nothing. "Chance variables" reminded me that Doob and... 31. Dale Lehman on Effective Number of Parameters in a Statistical ModelDecember 3, 2023 7:40 AM Just to be clear, are you saying that research such as this: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.37.3.189 is a complete waste of time? This... 32. Dean Eckles on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 9:51 PM To be clear, my point about advertising is prompted by "Others have published on these intervals (the mathematical basis goes... 33. Dean Eckles on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 9:50 PM One dumb comment is that if you want to advertise something, you should provide it some format other than a... 34. Tom Fiddaman on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 5:15 PM I'm not sure how many examples are needed to make a myth, but here's one. In the Wisconsin deer trustee... 35. nonrenormalizable on Russell's Paradox of ghostwritersDecember 2, 2023 2:28 PM Someone once told me that of the two volumes on String Theory by Green, Schwartz and Witten: "The cover is... 36. Dale Lehman on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 1:44 PM not me! must be a ghostwriter. And, who knows what idea they like? 37. Phil on Russell's Paradox of ghostwritersDecember 2, 2023 1:12 PM There's an impressive set of physics textbooks by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz. It's sometimes said the books contain "not... 38. Anoneuoid on Effective Number of Parameters in a Statistical ModelDecember 2, 2023 1:11 PM On your example of the house addition: I would say that would be a misuse of the model estimate for... 39. Ali on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 1:01 PM I don't think it is a new idea but I haven't read the full paper. When two 95%CI do not... 40. Dale Lehman on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 12:56 PM I like your idea. 41. roger koenker on Russell's Paradox of ghostwritersDecember 2, 2023 12:17 PM I'm surprised no one mentioned Courant and Robbins "What is Mathematics" which Courant refused to put Robbins's name on until... 42. paul alper on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 11:50 AM Gregory C. Mayer: Many thanks for the clear explanation. I had, of course, tried Wikipedia but nothing came up regarding... 43. Gregory C. Mayer on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 11:29 AM In a discussion here a while back, https:// statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/08/16/ confusions-about-inference-prediction-and-probability-of-superiority /, Anoneuoid pointed to viopoints, https://rdrr.io/cran/viopoints /man/viopoints.html, as in interesting visualization related to the... 44. Gregory C. Mayer on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 11:02 AM A dox plot is a box plot combined with a symmetric dot plot ("d"ot plus b"ox"). I don't know if... 45. Dale Lehman on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 10:24 AM Suggested revision to the title: "1001 ways to use p-values to beat an analysis into submission." I think the referee... 46. Dale Lehman on Russell's Paradox of ghostwritersDecember 2, 2023 10:08 AM chipmunk I'm shocked that you don't believe in accountability. If you don't know who wrote something, you don't know who... 47. paul alper on On a proposal to scale confidence intervals so that their overlap can be more easily interpretedDecember 2, 2023 10:06 AM According to today's blog, Greg Mayer wrote, "I, BTW, am rather fond of dox plots." Is this a typo, or... 48. somebody on Russell's Paradox of ghostwritersDecember 2, 2023 9:59 AM Bro you need to get out more 49. chipmunk on Russell's Paradox of ghostwritersDecember 2, 2023 9:55 AM I don't see anything appalling about ghostwriting. I don't don't understand why there is an obligation to name the actual... 50. Andrew on Russell's Paradox of ghostwritersDecember 2, 2023 8:57 AM Sean, Good point. Also, back in the day, editors and publishers had much more input, right? When I write a... Proudly powered by WordPress