ABSTRACT

In Hawaiian legend, Nanaue was the son of a shark who fell in love with a human women. He grew into a murderous man with a shark mouth in the middle of his back. In Greek legend, the minotaur was a man with the head of a bull. He was the spawn of a human woman and a great white bull. It is very common in the social sciences, and occasional in the natural sciences, to have an outcome variable that is discrete, like a count, but in which the values merely indicate different ordered levels along some dimension. There is no perfect way to plot the predictions of these log-cumulative-odds models. Software can be and often is written to hide all the monstrosity from people. But this does not make it go away. Instead, it just makes the models forever mysterious. For some users, mystery translates into awe.