08 Apr 2008
Blogger Fails Me
I just encountered the third time that I wanted to comment on a blog on blogger.com, and was unable to. Why? The Captcha. What about it? It never shows up for me. I see the tag text “Visual Verification” but there is no picture there. I look at the document source, I see that there is supposed to be a picture. I try to visit the image directly but that fails too. Thus, I have been unable to comment on any blogger.com blogs.
What I was going to comment on? This post on the economic way of thinking. I was going to point out to Gabriel that the aggregate versus individual behavior is likely a reference to the ecological fallacy. However, I also do not understand what Michael means by differences between causation and causality.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:39 -0500
What’s the ecological fallacy?
The Blogger problem is definitively on your side. Any ad blockers, stuff like that?
April 9th, 2008 at 15:34 -0500
Yea, clearly the blogger problem is on my end. Unfortunately, the problem persists even after disabling the ad blocker. I don’t know if it a general seamonkey problem or what. The problem doesn’t come up often enough for me to really work at figuring out the issue at this precise moment, however.
A non-ecological condition (kinda making up terms here) is when individual level behavior looks different than aggregate behavior. The ecological fallacy would be assuming that individual behavior looks the same as the aggregate behavior. If you have been following Andrew Gelman’s et. al. analysis of voting behavior among poor/rich individuals versus poor/rich states, you have seen non-ecological behavior (or rather, if they had assumed the state/individual level behavior would mimic the individual/state level behavior, you would have seen the fallacy): http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/04/red_state_blue_state_paradox_a.html
I think that should clarify the situation. As for being an economic way of thinking, I think he gives too much to economics. It should be a lesson in a basic (required!) statistics course, which economics inherits due to its close ties on the applied side to statistics.