New Year’s fireworks

I have to thank Xi’an for this: as he rightly guesses in his comments to my original post (earlier this year \(-\) well, for a few more hours still, at least!), my spam filter has worked a treat and if it weren’t for him, I would have missed this incredible spectacle of pre-new Year’s eve fireworks by Vincent Granville.

In his blog, Granville takes on evil statisticians who constantly talk down on data scientists. He seems to have a particular grudge with Andrew Gelman, who, Granville says, is our “leader and only influencer”.

What I found particularly amusing (and I needed this, as I’m still fighting off a nasty flu, so thank you very much, Xi’an!) is the bit when VC boasts about not even reading Gelman’s publications, as they “are disseminated to a very small audience in obscure journals that pretty much no mainstream people read”.

Now: I know that Google Scholar cannot be taken at face value and there are better ways of measuring how influential one’s research or publications are. But you can see Gelman’s numbers here. 14,000 citations on one book are sort-of suggesting a little less obscurity than that, I’d say. Sadly, Google Scholar can shed no light on how “mainstream” the people citing him are…

Happy new year!!