What correlation means

From Maria Konnikova’s New Yorker piece on Randall Munroe and what makes science interesting:

In a meta-analysis of sixty-six studies tracking interests over time (the average study followed subjects for seven years), psychologists from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that our interests in adolescence had only a point-five correlation with our interests later in life. This means that if a subject filled out a questionnaire about her interests at the age of, say, thirteen, and again at the age of twenty-one, only half of her answers remained consistent on both.

I think it’s totally OK to not say precisely what correlation means.  It’s sort of subtle!  It would be fine to say the correlation was “moderate,” or something like that.

But I don’t think it’s OK to say “This means that…” and then say something which isn’t what it means.  If the questionnaire was a series of yes-or-no questions, and if exactly half the answers stayed the same between age 13 and 21, the correlation would be zero.  As it should be — 50% agreement is what you’d expect if the two questionnaires had nothing to do with each other.  If the questionnaire was of a different kind, say, “rate your interest in the following subjects on a scale of 1 to 5,” then agreement on 50% of the answers would be more suggestive of a positive relationship; but it wouldn’t in any sense be the same thing as 0.5 correlation.  What does the number 0.5 add to the meaning of the piece?  What does the explanation add?  I think nothing, and I think both should have been taken out.

Credit, though — the piece does include a link to the original study, a practice that is sadly not universal!  But demerit — the piece is behind a paywall, leaving most readers just as unable as before to figure out what the study actually measured.  If you’re a journal, is the cost of depaywalling one article really so great that it’s worth forgoing thousands of New Yorker readers actually looking at your science?

 

 

 

George Saunders, “The Bohemians”

I remember being really charmed by his book Pastoralia, which is all about garbled management-speak and commercial items with wacky MultiCapNames and the basic human inability to step off stage ever.  In Persuasion Nation is just like that too, but it starts to feel like a schtick; yeah, yeah, in the future people think the most meaningful thing they can do is view advertisements, it’s comic yet eerily like our present condition, I get it.  But then again there’s “The Bohemians,” the best story here and a completely different thing:

Eddie Sr. rushed to the hospital with his Purple Heart and some photos of Eddie as a grinning wet-chinned kid on a pony.  He found Eddie handcuffed to the bed, with an IV drip and a smashed face.  Apparently, he’d bitten one of the Armenians.  Bail was set at three hundred.  The tailor shop made zilch.  Eddie Sr.’s fabrics were a lexicon of yesteryear.  Dust coated a bright-yellow sign that read “Zippers Repaired in Jiffy.”

“Jail for that kid, I admit, don’t make total sense,” the judge said.  “Three months in the Anston.  Best I can do.”

There’s really no other explanation for this but that George Saunders woke up one day and said “I want to write a Grace Paley story.” Well, why shouldn’t he?  Rock bands should cover the Velvet Underground and short story writers should try to write Grace Paley stories, though inevitably, in both cases, most will fail.

You can read “The Bohemians” online at the New Yorker.  Or watch him read it at Housing Works in NYC.  He plays for yuks more than I think is correct.

Part 1:

Part 2:  (the quoted paragraph is right at the beginning of this part.)

Lamb and black truffle sausage: Osteria Papavero, you crazy bastard, I love you

One of the appetizers at Osteria Papavero is “antipasti di tartufo” — three dishes with black truffle, subject to chef’s whim and different every night.  Truffle is one of those ingredients that I know is distinguished and I know is expensive but which has never really revealed its charms to me.  Papavero is helping me out with that problem.   I think I’m going to go ahead and order this dish every time I go, because it’s consistently the highlight of the meal.

Tuesday night, one of the plates was a truffled lamb sausage. Long, dark brown, a little pocked, served in a loose coil, looking a little disturbingly like — well, I’ll bet you can guess what it looked a little disturbingly like.  But it was superb:  coarsely ground, a little gamy or smoky, and rich as hell, without being, you know, stupidly rich.  One of the best things I’ve eaten in Madison.

Papavero has a Christmas tree with comic photos of the staff in place of ornaments.  Also a Xerox of the greatest New Yorker cartoon of all time:

Image courtesy of a post by Daniel Radosh, who observes that the caption is not identical with the one that originally ran in the magazine.  But this version is the one I know and admire.

Raymond Carver’s Gordon Lish problem, and mine

When my parents visited, they dropped off a stack of old New Yorkers, including this year’s fiction issue, which featured “Beginners,” Raymond Carver’s original version of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Carver’s version is moving, but also talky and baggy, possessing none of the rigorous terseness that we talk about when we talk about Raymond Carver. Except that maybe we were actually talking about Gordon Lish, who edited the story down to its bones. Or, more precisely, about the collaboration between the two. The New Yorker offers a remarkable chance to see how this kind of collaboration works: they’ve posted Carver’s original version with Lish’s edits superimposed, “Track Changes”-style:

My friend Mel Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right. ¶ The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel Herb and me I and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque, then. But but we were all from somewhere else. ¶ There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Mel Herb thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He said When he was young he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He He’d left the Church at the same time, but he said he still looked back on to those years in the seminary as the most important in his life.

That opening paragraph is actually treated pretty mildly; farther into the story, whole pages get the axe. Carver didn’t take Lish’s edits easily — in an exchange of letters published in the same New Yorker issue, he tries to pull back the stories from publication after seeing what Lish did to them. Carver felt Lish had violated his work — and he was right! But the work was better for being violated.

I know how he feels, a little, because I, too, have been edited by Gordon Lish. Sometime in 1995 I wrote a story called “What Can We Expect From the New Currency?” and submitted it to Lish’s magazine, The Quarterly. Lish called me on the phone to tell me he was accepting the story and that he’d send me a version with some edits by mail. When the package from Lish arrived, I discovered that what he was accepting was about a third of my story: most of the opening, broken up by the insertion of some paragraphs rescued from the mostly deleted latter sections.

And you know what? His version wasn’t really my story — but it was a lot better and cleaner than my story. And he didn’t change my title.

What I didn’t know was that The Quarterly was out of money, and would never publish another issue.