

Success of a Marriage in 15 Minutes? - JeffJenkins
http://www.slate.com/id/2246732/

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3pt14159
Slate and Rolling Stone continue to be some of my favorite websites strictly
because of this level of reporting. When I first heard of Gottam's claim in a
separate article on another site my immediate thought was "anyone can. They'll
just say everyone stays together and get 80% accuracy." This is the problem
with non-scientific researchers. They don't _want_ to learn about statistics.
They want easy, simple claims that everyone can understand. The corresponding
problem with the media is that they do not understand science well enough to
be critical of researchers' claims.

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mattmaroon
I love anything that points out Gladwell's pseudo-intellectual bullshit too.

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drunkpotato
He fitted a curve to the _training data_ and called it a _prediction_. How is
this not fraud?

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yungchin
I'd say it would only be fraud if he misreported his methods in his papers. I
think the Slate author just says that _she assumed_ his methods to have been
different than they were, after reading Gladwell's story about them.

Also, it seems to me that if you make a model that fits the data, that doesn't
at all mean that it doesn't have predictive power. You could fit it with one
data-set, and test it on another one. It just means that you now have a purely
empirical model, with no built-in assumptions on why it is so.

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araneae
Not testing the model on a validation set doesn't mean it doesn't have
predictive power... but if you don't test it, there's no way you can say it
_does_ have predictive power. And saying it predicts the data 87% of the time
when you're using the training set is in fact fraudulent.

I can't believe that no one called him on this before, or that he got away
with this! Anyone who has take a college statistics course knows that you have
to have separate sets for training and for validation. There are even a ton of
statistical methods to deal with this problem with a small data set, i.e.
bootstrapping your training set. There's no excuse.

In fact, I remember reading some Feynman lecture in which he specifically
mentions how bad this is... anyone got a citation for me?

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eru
> In fact, I remember reading some Feynman lecture in which he specifically
> mentions how bad this is... anyone got a citation for me?

It's interesting that we still long for citations of some authority figure ---
even when we all agree. (And I, too, would like to see what Feynman said.)

~~~
araneae
It's more of a longing to figure out what the heck I'm remembering. This
happens to me all the time with people, too... someone will look _really
familiar_ but I can't place them at all, and it drives me crazy.

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tokenadult
I agree with the several commenters who have commented that statistically
speaking, the cited researcher has not yet achieved "prediction." He has done
some interesting curve-fitting on a smallish data set, but has not tested his
curves on fresh data sets--something that every responsible scientist must do
sooner rather than later, if the scientist wishes to speak of "prediction." I
indicated my agreement with other comments by a bunch of upvotes, and also
posted the citation for Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" lecture.

That said, my wife and I have been using a couple of Gottman's recent books to
reexamine aspects of our twenty-six-year-plus marriage, and there is some good
advice for couples in Gottman's writings. It may not all be rigorous science,
but clinical experience based on close observation of many couples can be
helpful to any one couple who want to enjoy their marriage more and to pass on
advice to their children (four, in our case) about how to have happier
marriages in the next generation. So once we all agree that proper science
involves TESTING models developed through analysis of one data set on other
data sets, we can start some application of the clinical observations on
ourselves and see what we think after trying this out at home. My wife and I
have been pleased to become acquainted with these writings and to discuss them
together.

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andrewcooke
i realise this might be too personal, but i'd be interested in knowing what
you thought was useful after all that time (i've been in a relationship for
around 15 years).

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tokenadult
Styles of talking while discussing problems. EVERY marriage has problems, for
sure, but how a couple deals with problems can make problems part of what
enriches the relationship, or part of what drags it down. We encountered some
new kinds of problems in the last few years (from the outside), and thus had
this interest recently.

~~~
andrewcooke
thanks. sounds interesting, i'll look out for a copy...

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Robin_Message
Scribd link to original paper: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/28394063/353438>

JSTOR link to original paper: <http://www.jstor.org/stable/353438>

~~~
tokenadult
The title of the paper being "Predicting Marital Happiness and Stability from
Newlywed Interactions" is quite meaningful in light of what is being discussed
in this thread.

Full citation is

John M. Gottman, James Coan, Sybil Carrere and Catherine Swanson, Predicting
Marital Happiness and Stability from Newlywed Interactions, Journal of
Marriage and Family, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Feb., 1998), pp. 5-22

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pmichaud
tl;dr Researcher coded fairly short conversations between about 60 married
couples, then six years later he fed their marital status and self rated
happiness into the computer. He used modeling software to create an optimal
equation for prediction of marriage and happiness based on the variables he
had coded for originally.

It's a good first step, but it's not strictly predictive. It's like an older
financial model.

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yacin
Sweet, delicious over-fitting. What a way to start the day d;D.

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david927
I'm surprised to that the discussion here is only about how Gottam came to his
results, although that's fair game and I agree with you.

But there is learning here, too. My mother is a psychologist and she says that
the most destructive thing she sees in marriages is the level of toxicity.
Couples can have lots of fights, but if they never lose respect for each
other, they're usually ok. It's when this respect devolves that trouble
begins.

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klipt
There's a journal article criticizing that exact assumption: "The Hazards of
Predicting Divorce Without Crossvalidation"

[http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118971429/abstrac...](http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118971429/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0)

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pbhjpbhj
Is about whether metrics gathered from a 15 minute session, in which a man and
woman argue a contentious issue, can accurately predict divorce rates. The
metrics are primarily measured using facial recognition software it seems.
John Gottman, who claims to predict divorce with a 91% accuracy, is the main
subject. QI.

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eric_t
If he now interviews a new set of couples, does his predictions according to
the developed model, and it _still_ gives high accuracy, then we can call it
science.

The power of a good model lies not in how good it predicts what you know, but
how it can be used to model unknown/new phenomena.

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adamc
I'm surprised he didn't use other resampling (e.g.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resampling_%28statistics%29>) techniques to
validate the models. Not that resampling is a perfect answer, but...

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utnick
Makes you wonder how many of the other studies in Gladwell's books are equally
flawed

