20-year anniversary of this blog

Our first post was twenty years ago today.

It was followed by posts on The Electoral College favors voters in small states; Why it’s rational to vote; Bayes and Popper; and Overrepresentation of small states/provinces, and the USA Today effects.

Later that month we had our first post on the Red State/Blue State Paradox, a guest post on statistical issues in modeling social space, and a stab at partial pooling of interactions.

On 27 Oct came one of my favorite early posts, The blessing of dimensionality, and early the next month came Sam Cook’s post on her now-classic work on Bayesian software validation, which we now call SBC, for simulation-based calibration checking, an early post on cross-validation for Bayesian multilevel modeling—a topic on which we made lots of progress in the decades since.

Also in Nov 2004 came our first formulation of the important (to me) concept of institutional decision analysis, my discovery about correlations in before-after data, and a debunking of a claim of possible election fraud in Florida.

Those were the days!

We’ve published around 11,000 posts since then. If you want to read the old ones, just go into the blog archives or subscribe to the StatRetro twitter feed, which spits out links to old posts, in order, every eight hours. It’s currently at 2009. Once it catches up to us—I guess that won’t be for many years—we can restart it, if we’re able to do so.

Thanks so much to you, the commenters, who’ve supplied us with so much insight and feedback over the years. Even when you’re confused, it helps us by revealing flaws in our communication.

And to all you readers out there, keep reading—you’re why we do it!

And thanks to my co-bloggers, listed below in increasing order of number of posts so far:

Paul Buerkner Rohan Alexander Josh Miller Sean Talts Sander Greenland Witold Więcek Yu-Sung Su Sebastian Weber Lonni Besançon Joe Bafumi Lauren Kennedy Jon Zelner Michael Malecki Jeff Lax Leo Egidi Juli Simon Thomas Yuling Yao Mike Betancourt Masanao Yajima Charles Margossian Shira Mitchell Jonah Gabry Dean Eckles Lizzie Wolkovich Eric Novik Daniel Lee Sam Cook Dan Simpson Keith O’Rourke Aki Vehtari Jessica Hullman Phil Price Aleks Jakulin Bob Carpenter

The blog wouldn’t be the same without you. Here’s to another 20 years.