After getting called on mis-attributing Bonds's homers to being
a new, easy home stadium, RC tap-dances some and then adds
an oddity -
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001 10:14:06 +0200, Robert Chung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
[ snip, a bunch]
>
> My main point was not about baseball or Bonds. It was about the
> cavalier way that people toss around the phrase, "regression to
> the mean," as if it were an immutable law that trumped all other
> differences in conditions.
>
You know, I have never seen that. To the best I recollect,
I have never seen people toss around "regression to the
mean" in a cavalier way. (In person, I have hardly ever
heard it used when I wasn't the one who brought it up.)
I have seen it *clumsy* on this net-group. Maybe clumsy
and arrogant combine to be 'cavalier'? -- well, the ones
misusing it here were pretending a factual description was
somehow arbitrarily irrelevant; which might be 'cavalier'
in the opposite direction.
Even if they had heard of it, *most* people would not claim
a nodding acquaintance with what R to the M might mean.
Most of the ones with a *usable* notion of what it means
would be (my guess) intelligent and sensible.
Who gets trained in statistics beyond their understanding
of math? Ph.D. psychologists. (And many economists,
but they are not relevant here.) It's those PhD psychologists
who *I* would expect to cavalierly misunderstand, mis-state,
or misuse regression to the mean, in either direction.
--
Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
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