Without ever really intending to, I have come to be seen by some of my colleagues as the Guy Who Doesn’t Like Multimodal Pedagogy. By multimodal pedagogy I mean the contemporary yen for teaching mediums and technologies in writing classes that are not what most people would think of when they think of writing. So […]
Continue reading →Last week on Twitter, I shared a few excerpts from an assignment I had my freshman composition students do. In that in-class assignment, I had them rewrite sections of classic literature (once class got the opening to Moby Dick, the other the opening to A Tale of Two Cities) in the voice of another author or genre […]
Continue reading →At the beginning of this chat I had with Noah Millman, you’ll note my caveat: I speak as a dedicated but decidedly amateur student of artificial intelligence. Noah makes a similar announcement. I was thrilled to be invited by him to discuss issues of the philosophy and theory of knowledge of AI, and I had […]
Continue reading →I intend to write a long piece next week about a new study finding that academic science is not systematically or significantly sexist in some ways, and its New York Times writeup, this coming week. I have some ideas, some criticism, and some praise. Before that, I would just like to ask: please, please, please, read the […]
Continue reading →I’ve written in the past that Jacob Weisberg’s attack on Ned Lamont’s supporters is one of the worst things I’ve ever read, in the sense that it demonstrates so many of the worst instincts and presumptions of our political class. Well, Weisberg has really been covering himself with glory again, and for precisely the same […]
Continue reading →1. Statistical error is inevitable and necessary. Error, in its generic usage, pretty much always means that something has gone wrong. But statistical error refers instead to the natural variation in a distribution and the consequences of that variation. If I take a sample of some quantifiable variable, like height, and I find an average or […]
Continue reading →As Libby Nelson wrote, it seems like everybody and their brother, including your cousin Freddie, wrote about the Brookings Institution paper on student loan debts today. It’s an emotional conversation. Given the limitations of our information, it’s also a frustrating conversation. But it’s a profoundly necessary type of conversation, and one that we’re going to […]
Continue reading →I have a set of concerns about FiveThirtyEight and data journalism in general, but I also think that there’s a lot of interesting work being done there, and that there’s lots of reasons to be excited about some of the developments in how people are disseminating and reacting to research online. I want to endorse […]
Continue reading →So I’m going to re-up this piece I wrote about why “correlation does not causation” leads to a research nihilism that is more of a problem than mistaking correlation for causation. I’m doing it because of the viral proliferation of this website from Tyler Vigen, a Harvard law student. The website does what every statistics […]
Continue reading →It’s really to the credit of FiveThirtyEight that they’re making some of their data publicly available. That open access comes in part thanks to this wonderfully smart post by Brian Keegan, a postdoc from Northwestern. In it, Keegan advocates for availability of data by doing a replication of research by FiveThirtyEight’s Walt Hickey. In it, […]
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