Those who live by ChatGPT are destined to get advice of unpredictable quality

health non-sense [xkcd]

red state – blue state – vaccinated state – unvaccinated state

The New York Times published an article demonstrating the partisan separation between US Democrats and Republicans by regression lines. As the one above, regressing the proportion of vaccinated on the proportion of Trump voters but no scale on the first axis. But no correction for age composition or population density. And the one below, plotted at the county level, which seems quite meaningless given the spread of red dots in Wyoming.

Still, there is a clear opposition between places (counties) that voted more than 70% Trump (representing 33M people) and those that voted more than 70% Biden (more than 58M people), even though county density, age composition, and earlier deaths from COVID should also be accounted for. But the vaccination rate also exhibits this opposition, with a 1.65 ratio between the first and last decile of the blue counties.

gender gaps

Two of my colleagues [and co-authors] at Dauphine, Elyès Jouini and Clotilde Napp, published a paper in Science last week (and an associated tribune in Le Monde which I spotted first) about explaining differences in national gender inequalities in maths (as measured by PISA) in terms of the degree of overall inequality in the respective countries. Gaps in the highest maths performer sex ratio. While I have no qualm about the dependency or the overall statistical cum machine learning analysis (supported by our common co-author Jean-Michel Marin), and while I obviously know nothing about the topic!, I leisurely wonder at the cultural factor (which may also partly explain for the degree of inequality) when considering that the countries at the bottom of the above graphs are rather religious (and mostly catholic). I also find it most intriguing that the gender gap is consistently reversed when considering higher performer sex ratio for reading, because mastering the language should be a strong factor in power structures and hence differences therein should also lead to inequalities…

weapons of math destruction [book review]

As I had read many comments and reviews about this book, including one by Arthur Charpentier, on Freakonometrics, I eventually decided to buy it from my Amazon Associate savings (!). With a strong a priori bias, I am afraid, gathered from reading some excerpts, comments, and the overall advertising about it. And also because the book reminded me of another quantic swan. Not to mention the title. After reading it, I am afraid I cannot tell my ascertainment has changed much.

“Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.” (p.21)

The core message of this book is that the use of algorithms and AI methods to evaluate and rank people is unsatisfactory and unfair. From predicting recidivism to fire high school teachers, from rejecting loan applications to enticing the most challenged categories to enlist for for-profit colleges. Which is indeed unsatisfactory and unfair. Just like using the h index and citation ranking for promotion or hiring. (The book mentions the controversial hiring of many adjunct faculty by KAU to boost its ranking.) But this conclusion is not enough of an argument to write a whole book. Or even to blame mathematics for the unfairness: as far as I can tell, mathematics has nothing to do with unfairness. Some analysts crunch numbers, produce a score, and then managers make poor decisions. The use of mathematics throughout the book is thus completely inappropriate, when the author means statistics, machine learning, data mining, predictive algorithms, neural networks, &tc. (OK, there is a small section on Operations Research on p.127, but I figure deep learning can bypass the maths.)