Writing

In addition to my academic research, I think stats needs to be shared, considered, criticized, and enjoyed by everyone! To contribute to this, I write articles aimed at general audiences, covering national political issues, the history of statistics, baseball, elections, and a big statistical controversy. If you have trouble accessing any articles, please email me and I can send you a copy!

Recently, I defended the independence and importance of the federal statistical service in the face of Trump attacks on the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I also wrote about some statistical ideas that can show us how wrong Donald Trump & Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to governance is, even if they are interested in rooting out waste and fraud (which I doubt they are). Federal government statisticians and researchers, along with hundreds of thousands of other crucial federal workers, are under attack by right-wing Republicans, as are higher education and public health more generally.

Statistics and eugenics both formalized as disciplines in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and their histories are intimately linked. Some big names in statistics were also the founders, popularizers, and standard-bearers for the eugenics movement. These links will not go away if we ignore them, so we must confront them in our disciplines and in our classrooms. I argue for this confrontation, and provide some vignettes of this history that are suitable for undergraduate students, in The Pyschologist and in a longer article in the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education.

I recently reviewed Allen B. Downey’s Probably Overthinking It—a book covering some key paradoxes and pitfalls in probability and data analysis—for Mathematical Intelligencer. My review includes suggestions for where this might fit in a classroom setting, and comes with a bonus Ferris Bueller reference!

For the baseball (and causal inference) fans, I have articles on the impacts of the extra-innings zombie runner rule on game times and on the impact of the shift ban on batting results overall and for specific players. The shift ban analysis has an interactive web app that you can play with for more details. Coming soon: how well is the pre-arbitration bonus pool working and what can it tell us about how stats are used in society?

In election analysis, I have written about how election maps can mislead, not just by showing land area instead of population, but percentage changes rather than actual vote numbers. For example, while Biden in 2020 had a worse percentage margin than Clinton in Brooklyn, he had a higher vote margin, which is what actually matters for winning elections! You can investigate your own state and county here. Work in progress covers the distortions of the U.S. population that occur in the Electoral College and Senate: see this draft article and web app to explore the results.

In 2019, I wrote for a special issue of The American Statistician about p-values. These are a common statistical tool, but they have become very controversial in the field. I write about the history, how we got here, and why that matters. While it may seem a bit inside baseball, p-values affect how drugs get approved, how science gets reported, and many other aspects of your life!

If you have trouble accessing any of these articles, or want to chat with me about them, please reach out to me.