Can we recruit more statisticians to participate in CV?

Question

I think that if there is an awareness of the statisticians of the professional societies of the purpose and success of StackExchange CV many would want to help out. In the ASA quantitative literacy has been our goal to improve. Incoming ASA President Marie Davidian gave a presentation yesterday on a grant program she has to teach basic statistics for the aim of getting more American born students interested in pursuing a career in statistics or a related field. There is a recognition of the ever-growing need for statistics to handle big data problems and the Obama administration commitment to find research in these quantitative areas.

The great thing that CV does is to get the experts to teach the novices some basic statistics in the context of problems they are working on. The accumulation from many examples improves everyone's knowledge of good statistical practice including the experts'. If the ASA leadership could see how effective we are and have some assurance that the final accepted answers are sound I am sure they would feel an obligation to participate or at least encourage others to do so.

Who should we approach (ASA president, Presidents Elect, Past Presidents, other society leaders)? Would there be any changes to our system that would increase the participation of ASA members?

Answer 1

I think the opposite to Michael in one respect: it's important that no assurance should be given that the accepted answers are sound.

Many of the questions on CV concern real-life problems. A site for learners of Statistics to help each other learn is unequivocally a boon to the discipline; a site where professionally certified statisticians purport to provide solutions to non-statisticians on the basis of reading a couple of paragraphs about their problem would be a travesty of the consulting process. As it stands the onus is on askers of questions to make them clear & include all relevant information, & to critically evaluate the answers; anything that tended to give a contrary impression should be, & probably would be, of concern to professional bodies or learned societies considering lending their support to CV.

Statistical societies worldwide impose obligations on their members to keep on learning, help others learn, & promote public understanding of the discipline: CV is already well suited to help them fulfil these obligations.

Answer 2

As we are close to exhausting the comment thread, I will add my voice here. This is a personal take as a two-year member on this site.

I thought the original idea was to do some brainstorming on how to bring the attention of ASA members, and probably statisticians from other societies, to this site, Cross Validated.

The great thing that CV does is to get the experts to teach the novices some basic statistics in the context of problems they are working on.

Yes, it is true that we see a lot of good answers from working statisticians or consultants to working problems, but there are also many interesting exchanges between experts themselves. I don't think 'teaching novices' may really motivate professional statisticians to visit this site. Instead we need to clearly define what they can expect from this site (compared to ASA listserver, for example) and what benefit they can derive for themselves and for the community. In my view, an open platform for exchanges like this is an unique opportunity to give his voice to anyone interested in statistics, and share his opinion with others, whatever their level of expertise. It is close to the idea of Open Science, and in any case it offers new perspectives for experts and casual users to become acquainted with specific problems and engage in fruitful discussions. Who are the experts on this site? Everyone that provided the right answer to a nice question is a candidate. Everyone who consistently provides good answers to specific questions associated to a specific tag is certainly an expert, and he is probably perceived as such by the community. Other professional statisticians might enjoy exchanging with him.

We are a community of benevolent users. The purpose of this site, and more generally any sites in the Stack Exchange network, is to provide users with a repository of knowledgeable and long-lasting answers to specific and well-thought questions. Nothing more. We do not ask users who they are: they are free to add some personal information in their public profile. We do not ask users to be online everyday, but we expect they will be kind enough to follow questions and answers in which they are involved, and contribute to the community by voting, flagging, and helping the community as a whole (and writing blog posts if they have some free time :-). People involved in QAs get reputation and badges, as recognition of their participation. With higher reputation comes higher power to boost this site. No rating system is perfect, but the one which was chosen is generally doing its job: good answers get higher votes, active members get higher reputation. This reflects the opinion of the community, which is composed of experts and students in applied and theoretical statistics, casual users of statistics or "anyone else doing data analysis or interested in it as a discipline."

We ask questions and propose answers. New users can vote up when they have 15 rep. Starting with 125 rep, they can vote down. They are always free to accept an answer: this is their very own decision to mark an answer as useful with respect to the question they asked. Finally, askers can always change their mind if a new and better answer is offered. Again, this decision is that of the user. When the OP vote up and accept an answer, that makes up a total of 25 points to the respondent. Other users can cast their votes, in either direction, which offers an obvious counterbalance to this individual decision. Most importantly, votes help to sort out good questions and promote good answers.

We need votes. Voting is one of the bases of this site. However, as has been said on tex.SE, "content should always be the key." Everybody on this site can participate, and with growing reputation users get more privileges (retagging, voting to close, voting to reopen, wiki edits, etc.) to help to maintain this site in good health. Earning reputation in recognition of exemplary participation on SE has no other goal than allowing users to weigh in site management and expression of the user community. In the end, they become trusted users, and, certainly, they have always been willing to share their knowledge and expertise.

We elect moderators. Moderators are not elected to dictate anything on SE sites, but to help the community of users with specific tasks, in particular they "look at every flagged post, and take action if necessary," as described in A Theory of Moderation. As high-rep users often do, they also remind users with SE policy, provide guidelines for a better interaction on this wiki. It is important to remember that they are part of the community.

This site is really a good opportunity for us. I believe everyone here would agree that we try our best to promote best practices in statistical data analysis by providing authoritative and meticulous answers. Users do their best, taking into account the purpose of this site. Moreover, the SE system offers great facilities for live edits, updates, and add support for rich formatting of text. This is something that is clearly impossible on listserver. Professional statisticians might see this as a great opportunity to have more interactive and perennial exchanges.

To meet a higher purposes the judges of answers should be certified experts.

Who will decide on that? Does that mean that we have to exhibit a blue/white card attesting our level of knowledge, thereby allowing a weighted voting process? I think this reflects a misunderstanding of the purpose of Stack Exchange sites. "Professional statisticians" can decide to participate or not, as they do when interacting on dedicated mailing-lists, maintaining software, or providing up to date material on their own websites. We won't ask them what's their level of expertise is; we just ask them to provide the best possible answer, in the spirit of Stack Exchange community-driven sites.

I am sympathetic with any suggestion to extend this network of professional statisticians and people interested in statistics as a discipline. Surely, everybody will be happy with accredited statisticians visiting our site from time to time, but to challenge the actual quality of this site, as the following comment of yours might suggest

the system needs structure and consistency it seems to me to lack. A system that is based on reputation points assigned inconsistently by members who are novices and have no expertise to judge the correctness or incorrectness of answers.

runs counter to the motivations of Stack Exchange sites where everyone can contribute. Interested professionals are invited to participate, to the extent of their availability and their own interest.

To sum up,

CrossValidated is for statisticians, data miners, and anyone else doing data analysis or interested in it as a discipline.

• Anyone interested in contributing to this site is welcome.
• Contributions made by professional statisticians are greatly appreciated.
• This site promotes well-crafted and useful answers to specific problems, and it is driven by a community of benevolent users who all aspire to high quality.

Answer 3

My forecast is pessimistic.

The community of academic statisticians (aka ASA members) produces fantastic initiatives that would greatly enhance the discipline as a whole. Unfortunately, most of them are one-man uphill battles.

When Jim Pitman was the President of IMS, he actively promoted the idea of having more publications in open access. There were many good points in his presentations and articles on this (of which the most tangilbe outcomes is posting the Annals contents in arxiv.org). An obvious one is that it is cheaper for the end user -- why should one pay the commercial publisher for essentially zero added value? We submit a properly formatted, camera-ready paper (although I've had a number of examples of publishers who retyped my LaTeX into Word... it is difficult to desribe how furious I was fixing their typoes and furmatting errars); why paying somebody $1000/year to access five papers from this journal? Another idea had to do with incentives in evaluation of faculty: OK, we all understand that you need to publish in JASA and Annals to get tenured. But once you are there, why don't give more consideration to free online journals? Let the young faculty play in these high impact journals. People know who Peter Hall or David Dunson is if they've opened more than three issues of JASA or Annals over the last five years, and you don't need to continue proving yourself anymore to get promoted any further. Make your work accessible to non-academic researchers and the third world. Wonderful ideas; how much of that has changed over the past five years? None.

David Banks visited what then was my department of statistics, and gave a talk that analyzed whether Wikipedia is complete, in the sense of having every topic covered. In the end of the presentation, he urged the members of the audience to contribute to wikipedia and help improving it. Wonderful ideas; how many statisticians have contributed to Wikipedia over the past five years? A handful, I guess; and we probably have all of them on this site of benevolent statisticians, as chl put it. (I do list my contributions in my curriculum vitae, just in case I were to run across another benevolent statistician at the evaluating end.)

Finally, just looking at our website, of the big names in statistics (defined as people who would get an immediate recognition from about half of the attendees at the JSM... or whatever the analogue is in Europe -- sorry, my view is totally obstructed by the US borders), we have Michael Chernick and Frank Harrell, who does not seem to be very active recently. That's a very low hit rate -- I guess I could put another hundred or so names into this hat of the authors of the important books and papers who would fit the above definition.

Of the existing statistics cultures, only consulting (represented wonderfully by whuber) may have any incentives to contribute actively to CV. Academic statisticians need to publish their papers in as highly ranked journals as possible, and CV does not have an impact factor. Industry statisticians need to report their hours, and CV is not a paying client. Consultants may seek to extend their business, so CV may indeed be an engine. Once the criteria for promotion IN ALL DEPARTMENTS would include maintaing a 1000 rep/year on CV and maintaining at least three wikipedia pages in your expertise area, making at least one edit a year in each of them, the situation will change, and we'll all be crowded out by people who are better statisticians than StasK is. (I've heard of people who made contributing to CV a requirement for their consulting classes, though.)

Here's a little bit of the silver lining. The faculty search committees would benefit from CV in the parts of evaluating the communication abilities of their candidates: if a person can explain things well on CV to statistically un- (or under-) prepared audience, chances are they will succeed in the classroom or in the consulting function, too. This is the only realistic selling point I see as a way of explaining how CV can be useful to the statistical community, the way it exists and functions right now. If young faculty were to work on CV and to bring this kind of culture into their classes, we might see the paradigm shift in the nexts twenty or so years.