Home Statistics and Visualization Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Newly published in 2024

Newly published in 2024

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science 2025-01-01

Our big item is the book Active Statistics: Stories, Games, Problems, and Hands-on Demonstrations for Applied Regression and Causal Inference (Andrew Gelman and Aki Vehtari).

Then there are the recently published research articles:

It’s a good mix:  some technical work, some research methods, some applications, some teaching material, some reviews. Lots of collaborators!

If you want to see what’s coming next, you can check out the lists of unpublished and unwritten articles.

Here are our audios and videos from the past year:

Last but not least, our blog posts of 2024. We had 540 posts with 11,483 total comments:

It’s bezzle time: The Dean of Engineering at the University of Nevada gets paid $372,127 a year and wrote a paper that’s so bad, you can’t believe it. (204 comments) In some cases academic misconduct doesn’t deserve a public apology (177 comments) Getting a pass on evaluating ways to improve science (154 comments) Niall Ferguson, J. D. Vance, George Washington, and Jesus (129 comments) Stabbers gonna stab — fraud edition (124 comments) Suspicious data pattern in recent Venezuelan election (111 comments) This well-known paradox of R-squared is still buggin me. Can you help me out? (105 comments) Reflections on the recent election (103 comments) The mainstream press is failing America (UK edition) (99 comments) The Behavioural Insights Team decided to scare people. (98 comments) If you want to play women’s tennis at the top level, there’s a huge benefit to being ____. Not just ____, but exceptionally ___, outlier-outlier ___. (And what we can learn about social science from this stylized fact.) (94 comments) “Is it really ‘the economy, stupid’?” (91 comments) Bad stuff going down at the American Sociological Association (84 comments) How to think about the claim by Justin Wolfers that “the income of the average American will double approximately every 39 years”? (84 comments) Polling averages and political forecasts and what do you really think is gonna happen in November? (83 comments) Intelligence is whatever machines cannot (yet) do (82 comments) On the border between credulity and postmodernism: The case of the UFO’s-as-space-aliens media insiders (78 comments) Understanding p-values: Different interpretations can be thought of not as different “philosophies” but as different forms of averaging. (78 comments) “Not once in the twentieth century . . . has a single politician, actor, athlete, or surgeon emerged as a first-rate novelist, despite the dismayingly huge breadth of experience each profession affords.” (77 comments) Abraham Lincoln and confidence intervals (77 comments) What is the prevalence of bad social science? (76 comments) Whassup with those economists who predicted a recession that then didn’t happen? (74 comments) Feedback on the blog—this is your chance! (74 comments) If school funding doesn’t really matter, why do people want their kid’s school to be well funded? (69 comments) “It’s a very short jump from believing kale smoothies are a cure for cancer to denying the Holocaust happened.” (69 comments) On lying politicians and bullshitting scientists (67 comments) My comments on Nate Silver’s comments on the Fivethirtyeight election forecast (66 comments) My suggestion for the 2028 Olympics (66 comments) The statistical controversy over “White Rural Rage: the Threat to American Democracy” (and a comment about post-publication review) (65 comments) HMC fails when you initialize at the mode (63 comments) Selection bias leads to confusion about the relative stability of deterministic and stochastic algorithms (63 comments) Wendy Brown: “Just as nothing is more corrosive to serious intellectual work than being governed by a political programme (whether that of states, corporations, or a revolutionary movement), nothing is more inapt to a political campaign than the unending reflexivity, critique and self-correction required of scholarly inquiry.” (63 comments) Bayesians are frequentists. (62 comments) More red meat for you AI skeptics out there (61 comments) The River, the Village, and the Fort: Nate Silver’s new book, “On the Edge” (61 comments) “Zombie Ideas” in psychology, from personality profiling to lucky golf balls (61 comments) Andrew Gelman is not the science police because there is no such thing as the science police (60 comments) With journals, it’s all about the wedding, never about the marriage. (59 comments) Stanford medical school professor misrepresents what I wrote (but I kind of understand where he’s coming from) (59 comments) Hey—let’s collect all the stupid things that researchers say in order to deflect legitimate criticism (58 comments) Bayesian statistics: the three cultures (58 comments) A quick simulation to demonstrate the wild variability of p-values (58 comments) How to think about the effect of the economy on political attitudes and behavior? (57 comments) Forking paths in LLMs for data analysis (57 comments) Two kings, a royal, a knight, and three princesses walk into a bar (Nobel prize edition) (57 comments) Prediction markets in 2024 and poll aggregation in 2008 (57 comments) The New York Young Republican Club (56 comments) Holes in Bayesian statistics (my talk tomorrow at the Bayesian conference, based on work with Yuling) (56 comments) Abortion crime controversy update (55 comments) Some references and discussions on the foundations of probability—not the math so much as its connection to the real world, including the claim that “Pr(aliens exist on Neptune that can rap battle) = .137” (54 comments) Props to the liberal anticommunists of the 1930s-1950s (54 comments) Interpreting recent Iowa election poll using a rough Bayesian partition of error (54 comments) How would the election turn out if Biden or Trump were replaced by a different candidate? (53 comments) Uncertainty in games: How to get that balance so that there’s a motivation to play well, but you can still have a chance to come back from behind? (52 comments) Decisions of parties to run moderate or extreme candidates (52 comments) Benefit of Stanford: Are there connections between unethical behavior in science promotion and cheating in private life? (51 comments) When all else fails, add a code comment (50 comments) The feel-good open science story versus the preregistration (who do you think wins?) (49 comments) Deadwood (49 comments) Why are all these school cheating scandals happening? (48 comments) Is marriage associated with happiness for men or for women? Or both? Or neither? (48 comments) He took public funds and falsified his data. Are they gonna make him pay back the $19 million? (48 comments) Arnold Foundation and Vera Institute argue about a study of the effectiveness of college education programs in prison. (46 comments) How do you interpret standard errors from a regression fit to the entire population? (46 comments) It’s Harvard time, baby: “Kerfuffle” is what you call it when you completely botched your data but you don’t want to change your conclusions. (46 comments) Where have all the count words gone? In defense of “fewer” and “among” (45 comments) Arguing about bitcoin (44 comments) Polling by asking people about their neighbors: When does this work? Should people be doing more of it? And the connection to that French dude who bet on Trump (44 comments) Prediction isn’t everything, but everything is prediction (43 comments) Who wrote the music for In My Life? Three Bayesian analyses (43 comments) Honesty and transparency are not enough: politics edition (43 comments) What’s gonna happen between now and November 5? (42 comments) What’s the story behind that paper by the Center for Open Science team that just got retracted? (42 comments) Torment executioners in Reno, Nevada, keep tormenting us with their publications. (41 comments) “You want to gather data to determine which of two students is a better basketball shooter. You plan to have each student take N shots and then compare their shooting percentages. Roughly how large does N have to be for you to have a good chance of distinguishing a 30% shooter from a 40% shooter?” (41 comments) Why are we making probabilistic election forecasts? (and why don’t we put so much effort into them?) (41 comments) The appeal of New York Times columnist David Brooks . . . Yeah, I know this all sounds like a nutty “it’s wheels within wheels, man” sort of argument, but I’m serious here! (40 comments) Sympathy for the Nudgelords: Vermeule endorsing stupid and dangerous election-fraud claims and Levitt promoting climate change denial are like cool dudes in the 60s wearing Che T-shirts and thinking Chairman Mao was cool—we think they’re playing with fire, they think they’re cute contrarians pointing out contradictions in the system. For a certain kind of person, it’s fun to be a rogue. (40 comments) Freakonomics does it again (not in a good way). Jeez, these guys are credulous: (40 comments) Mister P and Stan go to Bangladesh . . . (39 comments) “Things are Getting So Politically Polarized We Can’t Measure How Politically Polarized Things are Getting” (39 comments) Opposition (38 comments) “My basic question is do we really need data to be analysed by both methods?” (38 comments) The most interesting part of the story is that the publisher went through all these steps of reviewing and revising. If they just want to make money by publishing crap, why bother engaging outside reviewers at all? (38 comments) A new argument for estimating the probability that your vote will be decisive (37 comments) Kamala Harris gets coveted xkcd endorsement. (37 comments) Implicitly denying the controversy associated with the Implicit Association Test. (Whassup with the American Association of Arts & Sciences?) (37 comments) Simulation to understand two kinds of measurement error in regression (36 comments) I strongly doubt that any human has ever typed the phrase, “torment executioners,” on any keyboard—except, of course, in discussions such as this. (36 comments) What is the purpose of a methods section? (36 comments) The four principles of Barnard College: Respect, empathy, kindness . . . and censorship? (35 comments) Whooping cough! How to respond to fatally-flawed papers? An example, in a setting where the fatal flaw is subtle, involving a confounding of time and cohort effects (35 comments) The election is coming: What forecasts should we trust? (35 comments) Prediction markets and the need for “dumb money” as well as “smart money” (35 comments) “The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science” (35 comments) Shreddergate! A fascinating investigation into possible dishonesty in a psychology experiment (34 comments) 20 years of blogging . . . What have been your favorite posts? (34 comments) That’s what happens when you try to run the world while excluding 99.8% of the population (34 comments) The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism (34 comments) What’s the problem, “math snobs” or rich dudes who take themselves too seriously and are enabled in that by the news media? (33 comments) (Trying to) clear up a misunderstanding about decision analysis and significance testing (33 comments) “Take a pass”: New contronym just dropped. (33 comments) Well, today we find our heroes flying along smoothly… (33 comments) “How a simple math error sparked a panic about black plastic kitchen utensils”: Does it matter when an estimate is off by a factor of 10? (33 comments) “Why do medical tests always have error rates?” (32 comments) Toward a unified theory of bad science and bad scholarship (32 comments) Michael Clayton in NYC (32 comments) I’ve been mistaken for a chatbot (31 comments) Here’s my excuse for using obsolete, sub-optimal, or inadequate statistical methods or using a method irresponsibly. (31 comments) “Participants reported being hungrier when they walked into the café (mean = 7.38, SD = 2.20) than when they walked out [mean = 1.53, SD = 2.70, F(1, 75) = 107.68, P < 0.001].” (30 comments) “Don’t feed the trolls” and the troll semi-bluff (30 comments) Bad parenting in the news, also, yeah, lots of kids don’t believe in Santa Claus (30 comments) What do the data say about Kamala Harris’s electability? (30 comments) When is calibration enough? (30 comments) “I wonder just what it takes to get people to conclude that a research seam has been mined to the point of exhaustion.” (30 comments) Extinct Champagne grapes? I can be even more disappointed in the news media (29 comments) Relating t-statistics and the relative width of confidence intervals (29 comments) Report of average change from an Alzheimer’s drug: I don’t get the criticism here. (29 comments) Obnoxious receipt from Spirit Airlines (29 comments) The recent Iranian election: Should we be suspicious that the vote totals are all divisible by 3? (29 comments) Bill James hangs up his hat. Also some general thoughts about book writing vs. blogging. Also I push back against James’s claim about sabermetrics and statistics. (29 comments) Unsolicited feedback on your research from the LLMs at large (29 comments) Defining statistical models in JAX? (29 comments) She wants to know what are best practices on flagging bad responses and cleaning survey data and detecting bad responses. Any suggestions from the tidyverse or crunch.io? (29 comments) What to do with age? (including a regression predictor linearly and also in discrete steps) (28 comments) “Our troops with aching hearts were obliged to fire a part of the town as a punishment.” (28 comments) The Rider (28 comments) “Trivia question for you. I kept temperature records for 100 days one year in Boston, starting August 15th (day “0”). What would you guess is the correlation between day# and temp? r=???” (28 comments) Anti-immigration attitudes: they didn’t want a bunch of Hungarian refugees coming in the 1950s (28 comments) What genre of writing is AI-generated poetry? (28 comments) “I work in a biology lab . . . My PI proposed a statistical test that I think is nonsense. . .” (28 comments) Blog is adapted to laptops or desktops, not to smartphones or pads. (27 comments) “On the uses and abuses of regression models: a call for reform of statistical practice and teaching”: We’d appreciate your comments . . . (27 comments) Inspiring story from a chemistry classroom (27 comments) Which books, papers, and blogs are in the Bayesian canon? (27 comments) 3M misconduct regarding knowledge of “forever chemicals”: As is so often the case, the problem was in open sight for a long time before anything was done (27 comments) God is in every leaf of every tree—comic book movies edition. (26 comments) Our new Substack newsletter: The Future of Statistical Modeling! (26 comments) Pinker was right, I was wrong. (26 comments) Does this study really show that lesbians and bisexual women die sooner than straight women? Disparities in Mortality by Sexual Orientation in a Large, Prospective JAMA Paper (26 comments) A cook, a housemaid, a gardener, a chauffeur, a nanny, a philosopher, and his wife . . . (26 comments) MCMC draws cannot fill the posterior in high dimensions (26 comments) Beyond junk science: How to go forward (26 comments) Instability of win probability in election forecasts (with a little bit of R) (26 comments) Mark Twain on chatbots (26 comments) Fake data on the honeybee waggle dance, followed by the inevitable “It is important to note that the conclusions of our studies remain firm and sound.” (26 comments) Make a hypothesis about what you expect to see, every step of the way. A manifesto: (26 comments) “Of course, this could conceivably be a case of near unbelievable luck: A flawed analysis based on wrong assumptions gave an unusually large causal effect estimate – but the misguided result just happened to be correct. We can imagine how the research team huddled nervously around the computer terminal biting their nails and silently praying as they executed their updated Stata code, only to erupt in joy and celebration as the results appeared on screen and revealed they were right all along. . . .” (26 comments) A very interesting discussion by Roy Sorensen of the interesting-number paradox (26 comments) I love this paper but it’s barely been noticed. (25 comments) Conformal prediction and people (25 comments) More on the disconnect between who voters support and what they support (25 comments) Ancestor-worship in academia: Where does it happen? (25 comments) A welcome rant on betting, knowledge, belief, and the foundations of probability (25 comments) Oh no Stanford no no no not again please make it stop (25 comments) Evidence-based Medicine Eats Itself, and How to do Better (my talk at USC this Friday) (25 comments) This one might possibly be interesting. (25 comments) 4 different meanings of p-value (and how my thinking has changed) (25 comments) Credit where due to NPR regarding science data fraud, and here’s how they can do even better (25 comments) Why isn’t Barack Obama out there giving political speeches? (24 comments) “Exclusive: Embattled dean accused of plagiarism in NSF report” (yup, it’s the torment executioners) (24 comments) Mindlessness in the interpretation of a study on mindlessness (and why you shouldn’t use the word “whom” in your dating profile) (24 comments) “Here’s the Unsealed Report Showing How Harvard Concluded That a Dishonesty Expert Committed Misconduct” (24 comments) Again on the role of elite media in spreading UFOs-as-space-aliens and other bad ideas (24 comments) The piranha problem: Large effects swimming in a small pond (24 comments) Crap papers with crude political agendas published in scientific journals: A push-pull problem (24 comments) log(A + x), not log(1 + x) (24 comments) B-school prof data sleuth lawsuit fails (24 comments) Nonsampling error and the anthropic principle in statistics (24 comments) A 10% swing in win probability corresponds (approximately) to a 0.4% swing in predicted vote (24 comments) How large is that treatment effect, really? (My talk at the NYU economics seminar, Thurs 7 Mar 18 Apr) (23 comments) “I was left with an overwhelming feeling that the World Values Survey is simply a vehicle for telling stories about values . . .” (23 comments) Grappling with uncertainty in forecasting the 2024 U.S. presidential election (23 comments) Google is violating the First Law of Robotics. (23 comments) A question for Nate Cohn at the New York Times regarding a claim about adjusting polls using recalled past vote (23 comments) New Course: Prediction for (Individualized) Decision-making (23 comments) Bias remaining after adjusting for pre-treatment variables. Also the challenges of learning through experimentation. (23 comments) “Accounting for Nonresponse in Election Polls: Total Margin of Error” (23 comments) This post is not really about Aristotle. (22 comments) The free will to repost (22 comments) Paper cited by Stanford medical school professor retracted—but even without considering the reasons for retraction, this paper was so bad that it should never have been cited. (22 comments) “AI” as shorthand for turning off our brains. (This is not an anti-AI post; it’s a discussion of how we think about AI.) (22 comments) Fewer kids in our future: How historical experience has distorted our sense of demographic norms (22 comments) More on the oldest famous person ever (just considering those who lived to at least 104) (22 comments) Freakonomics asks, “Why is there so much fraud in academia,” but without addressing one big incentive for fraud, which is that, if you make grabby enough claims, you can get featured in . . . Freakonomics! (22 comments) Fake stories in purported nonfiction (22 comments) Applications of (Bayesian) variational inference? (22 comments) The immediate victims of the con would rather act as if the con never happened. Instead, they’re mad at the outsiders who showed them that they were being fooled. (21 comments) The contrapositive of “Politics and the English Language.” One reason writing is hard: (21 comments) “A passionate group of scientists determined to revolutionize the traditional publishing model in academia” (21 comments) It’s Ariely time! They had a preregistration but they didn’t follow it. (21 comments) Do research articles have to be so one-sided? (21 comments) Adverse Adult Research Outcomes Increased After Increased Willingness of Public Health Journals to Publish Absolute Crap (21 comments) The NYT sinks to a new low in political coverage (21 comments) Calibration is sometimes sufficient for trusting predictions. What does this tell us when human experts use model predictions? (21 comments) Keith O’Rourke’s final published paper: “Statistics as a social activity: Attitudes toward amalgamating evidence” (21 comments) Close Reading Archive (21 comments) Ben Shneiderman’s Golden Rules of Interface Design (20 comments) Clinical trials that are designed to fail (20 comments) Zotero now features retraction notices (20 comments) “He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.” (20 comments) Evidence, desire, support (20 comments) Now here’s a tour de force for ya (20 comments) To what extent is psychology different from other fields regarding fraud and replication problems? (20 comments) What to do with election forecasts after Biden is replaced on the ticket? Also something on prediction markets. (20 comments) The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars (20 comments) Carroll/Langer: Credulous, scientist-as-hero reporting from a podcaster who should know better (20 comments) Who understands alignment anyway (19 comments) “‘Pure Craft’ Is a Lie” and other essays by Matthew Salesses (19 comments) Myths of American history from the left, right, and center; also a discussion of the Why everything you thought you knew was wrong” genre of book. (19 comments) Sorry, NYT, but, yes, “Equidistant Letter Sequences in the Book of Genesis” was junk science (19 comments) Clarke’s Law, and who’s to blame for bad science reporting (18 comments) Preregistration is a floor, not a ceiling. (18 comments) Hey! Here’s a study where all the preregistered analyses yielded null results but it was presented in PNAS as being wholly positive. (18 comments) “Andrew, you are skeptical of pretty much all causal claims. But wait, causality rules the world around us, right? Plenty have to be true.” (18 comments) Not eating sweet potatoes: Is that gonna kill me? (18 comments) Three takes on the protests at Columbia University (18 comments) Marquand. (18 comments) 5 different reasons why it’s important to include pre-treatment variables when designing and analyzing a randomized experiment (or doing any causal study) (18 comments) How did the press do on that “black spatula” story? Not so great. (18 comments) Here’s a sad post for you to start the new year. The Onion (ok, an Onion-affiliate site) is plagiarizing. For reals. (17 comments) Jonathan Bailey vs. Stephen Wolfram (17 comments) The data are on a 1-5 scale, the mean is 4.61, and the standard deviation is 1.64 . . . What’s so wrong about that?? (17 comments) What to make of implicit biases in LLM output? (17 comments) Statistics Blunder at the Supreme Court (17 comments) Design analysis is not just about statistical significance and power; it’s relevant for Bayesian inference too. (17 comments) What can aspiring political moderates learn from the example of Nelson Rockefeller? (17 comments) Chutzpah is their superpower (Dominic Sandbrook edition) (17 comments) Stan’s autodiff is 4x faster than JAX on CPU but 5x slower on GPU (in one eval) (17 comments) “Toward reproducible research: Some technical statistical challenges” and “The political content of unreplicable research” (my talks at Berkeley and Stanford this Wed and Thurs) (17 comments) Clybourne Park. And a Jamaican beef patty. (But no Gray Davis, no Grover Norquist, no rabbi.) (17 comments) Columbia Surgery Prof Fake Data Update . . . (yes, he’s still being promoted on the university webpage) (17 comments) Objects of the class “David Owen” (17 comments) Why does this guy have 2 gmail accounts? (17 comments) Why am I willing to bet you $100-1000 there will be a Nobel Prize for Adaptive Experimentation in the next 40 years? (17 comments) Regarding the use of “common sense” when evaluating research claims (16 comments) “Whistleblowers always get punished” (16 comments) Every time Tyler Cowen says, “Median voter theorem still underrated! Hail Anthony Downs!”, I’m gonna point him to this paper . . . (16 comments) People have needed rituals to turn data into truth for many years. Why would we be surprised if many people now need procedural reforms to work? (16 comments) No, it’s not “statistically implausible” when results differ between studies, or between different groups within a study. (16 comments) I just got a strange phone call from two people who claimed to be writing a news story. They were asking me very vague questions and I think it was some sort of scam. I guess this sort of thing is why nobody answers the phone anymore. (16 comments) “A bizarre failure in the review process at PNAS” (16 comments) From what body part does the fish rot? (16 comments) Put multiple graphs on a page: that’s what Nathan Yau says, and I agree. (16 comments) Remember that paper that reported contagion of obesity? How’s it being cited nowadays? (16 comments) It’s martingale time, baby! How to evaluate probabilistic forecasts before the event happens? Rajiv Sethi has an idea. (Hint: it involves time series.) (16 comments) The odd non-spamness of some spam comments (16 comments) “And while I don’t really want a back-and-forth . . .” (15 comments) “When will AI be able to do scientific research both cheaper and better than us, thus effectively obsoleting humans?” (15 comments) Scientific publishers busily thwarting science (again) (15 comments) A suggestion on how to improve the broader impacts statement requirement for AI/ML papers (15 comments) Putting a price on vaccine hesitancy (Bayesian analysis of a conjoint experiment) (15 comments) What is your superpower? (15 comments) Who is the Stephen Vincent Benet of today? (15 comments) “The Active Seating Zone (An Educational Experiment)” (15 comments) The JAMA effect plus news media echo chamber: More misleading publicity on that problematic claim that lesbians and bisexual women die sooner than straight women (15 comments) Heroes and Villains: The Effects of Identification Strategies on Strong Causal Claims in France (15 comments) Present Each Other’s Posters: An update after 15 years (15 comments) Different perspectives on the claims in the paper, The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development (15 comments) What makes an MCMC sampler GPU-friendly? (15 comments) Meta-analysis with a single study (15 comments) Those correction notices, in full. (Yes, it’s possible to directly admit and learn from error.) (15 comments) Practical issues with calibration for every group and every decision problem (15 comments) Presidential campaign effects are small. (15 comments) Bayesian inference (and mathematical reasoning more generally) isn’t just about getting the answer; it’s also about clarifying the mapping from assumptions to inference to decision. (15 comments) The Lakatos soccer training (14 comments) “Science as Verified Trust” (14 comments) Hand-drawn Statistical Workflow at Nelson Mandela (14 comments) Combining multiply-imputed datasets, never easy (14 comments) Simulation from a baseline model as a way to better understand your data: This is what “hypothesis testing” should be. (14 comments) Age gaps between spouses in U.S., U.K., and India (14 comments) “Alphabetical order of surnames may affect grading” (14 comments) Piranhas for “omics”? (14 comments) Pete Rose and gambling addiction: An insight and a question (14 comments) Update on that politically-loaded paper published in Demography that I characterized as a “hack job”: Further post-publication review (14 comments) Bad science as genre fiction: I think there’s a lot to be said for this analogy! (14 comments) If you wanted to be a top tennis player in the late 1930s, there was a huge benefit to being a member of ____. Or to being named ____. (14 comments) The Village Voice in the 1960s/70s and blogging in the early 2000s (14 comments) Social penumbras predict political attitudes (my talk at Harvard on Monday Feb 12 at noon) (13 comments) A new piranha paper (13 comments) “There is a war between the ones who say there is a war, and the ones who say there isn’t.” (13 comments) Another opportunity in MLB for Stan users: the Phillies are hiring (13 comments) Statistical factuality versus practicality versus poetry (13 comments) Nicholas Carlini on LLMs and AI for research programmers (13 comments) Movements in the prediction markets, and going beyond a black-box view of markets and prediction models (13 comments) ChatGPT o1-preview can code Stan (13 comments) What if the polls are right? (some scatterplots, and some comparisons to vote swings in past decades) (13 comments) Help teaching short-course that has a healthy dose of data simulation (13 comments) Answering two questions, one about Bayesian post-selection inference and one about prior and posterior predictive checks (13 comments) Evaluating samplers with reference draws (12 comments) Refuted papers continue to be cited more than their failed replications: Can a new search engine be built that will fix this problem? (12 comments) Their signal-to-noise ratio was low, so they decided to do a specification search, use a one-tailed test, and go with a p-value of 0.1. (12 comments) You probably don’t have a general algorithm for an MLE of Gaussian mixtures (12 comments) This is a very disturbing map. (12 comments) This is not an argument against self-citations. It’s an argument about how they should be counted. Also, a fun formula that expresses the estimated linear regression coefficient as a weighted average of local slopes. (12 comments) Data issues in that paper that claims that TikTok and Instagram have consumption spillovers that lead to negative utility (12 comments) Sports media > Prestige media (space aliens edition) (12 comments) In search of a theory associating honest citation with a higher/deeper level of understanding than (dishonest) plagiarism (12 comments) Sports gambling addiction epidemic fueled by some combination of psychology, economics, and politics (12 comments) Awesome online graph guessing game. And scatterplot charades. (12 comments) “Pitfalls of Demographic Forecasts of US Elections” (12 comments) A feedback loop can destroy correlation: This idea comes up in many places. (11 comments) The paradox of replication studies: A good analyst has special data analysis and interpretation skills. But it’s considered a bad or surprising thing that if you give the same data to different analysts, they come to different conclusions. (11 comments) Hey, here’s some free money for you! Just lend your name to this university and they’ll pay you $1000 for every article you publish! (11 comments) Mary Rosh! (11 comments) When Steve Bannon meets the Center for Open Science: Bad science and bad reporting combine to yield another ovulation/voting disaster (11 comments) Boris and Natasha in America: How often is the wife taller than the husband? (11 comments) What happens when you’ve had deferential media coverage and then, all of a sudden, you’re treated as a news item rather than as a figure of admiration? (11 comments) A data science course for high school students (11 comments) Is there a balance to be struck between simple hierarchical models and more complex hierarchical models that augment the simple frameworks with more modeled interactions when analyzing real data? (11 comments) Blog was down and is now operating again. (11 comments) The state of statistics in 1990 (11 comments) “A Hudson Valley Reckoning: Discovering the Forgotten History of Slaveholding in My Dutch American Family” (11 comments) Probabilistic numerics and the folk theorem of statistical computing (11 comments) Specification curve analysis and the multiverse (11 comments) The true meaning of the alzabo (11 comments) Resources for teaching and learning survey sampling, from Scott Keeter at Pew Research (10 comments) Hey! Here’s some R code to make colored maps using circle sizes proportional to county population. (10 comments) Our new book, Active Statistics, is now available! (10 comments) “Hot hand”: The controversy that shouldn’t be. And thinking more about what makes something into a controversy: (10 comments) N=43, “a statistically significant 226% improvement,” . . . what could possibly go wrong?? (10 comments) If I got a nickel every time . . . (10 comments) “Nonreplicable” publications are cited more than “replicable” ones? (10 comments) Implicit assumptions in the Tversky/Kahneman example of the blue and green taxicabs (10 comments) It’s Stanford time, baby: 8-hour time-restricted press releases linked to a 91% higher risk of hype (10 comments) “Responsibility for Raw Data”: “Failure to retain data for some reasonable length of time following publication would produce notoriety equal to the notoriety attained by publishing inaccurate results. A possibly more effective means of controlling quality of publication would be to institute a system of quality control whereby random samples of raw data from submitted journal articles would be requested by editors and scrutinized for accuracy and the appropriateness of the analysis performed.” (10 comments) The interactions paradox in statistics (10 comments) Here is the Data Sharing Statement, in its entirety, for van Dyck CH, Swanson CJ, Aisen P, et al. Trial of Lecanemab in Early Alzheimer’s Disease. N Engl J Med. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2212948. (10 comments) Which book should you read first, Active Statistics or Regression and Other Stories? (10 comments) Stan Playground: Run Stan on the web, play with your program and data at will, and no need to download anything on your computer (10 comments) How to cheat at Codenames; cheating at board games more generally (10 comments) Progress in 2023 (9 comments) What’s up with spring blooming? (9 comments) Fun with Dååta: Reference librarian edition (9 comments) Hey, I got tagged by RetractoBot! (9 comments) Minimum criteria for studies evaluating human decision-making (9 comments) Here’s some academic advice for you: Never put your name on a paper you haven’t read. (9 comments) Defining optimal reliance on model predictions in AI-assisted decisions (9 comments) Philip K. Dick’s character names (9 comments) Evilicious 3: Face the Music (9 comments) Two kings, a royal, a knight, and three princesses walk into a bar . . . (Dude from Saudi Arabia accuses the lords of AI of not giving him enough credit.) (9 comments) Dan Luu asks, “Why do people post on [bad platform] instead of [good platform]?” (9 comments) When the story becomes the story (9 comments) 1. Why so many non-econ papers by economists? 2. What’s on the math GRE and what does this have to do with stat Ph.D. programs? 3. How does modern research on combinatorics relate to statistics? (9 comments) Pervasive randomization problems, here with headline experiments (9 comments) Some solid criticisms of Ariely and Nudge—from 2012! (9 comments) It’s lumbar time: Wrong inference because of conditioning on a reasonable, but in this case false, assumption. (9 comments) You can guarantee that the term “statistical guarantee” will irritate me. Here’s why, and let’s go into some details. (9 comments) It’s $ time! How much should we charge for a link? (9 comments) “How bad are search results?” Dan Luu has some interesting thoughts: (9 comments) Some books: The Good Word (1978), The Hitler Conspiracies (2020), In Defense of History (1999), The Book of the Month (1986), Slow Horses (2010), Freedom’s Dominion (2022), A Meaningful Life (1971) (9 comments) Background on “fail fast” (9 comments) “Unusual Betting Patterns With Several Temple Games”: It’s martingale time, baby! (9 comments) “The Stadium” by Frank Guridy (9 comments) “Very interesting failed attempt at manipulation on Polymarket today” (9 comments) Supercentenarian superfraud update (9 comments) Inaccuracy in New York magazine report on election forecasting (9 comments) The comments section: A request to non-commenters, occasional commenters, and frequent commenters (9 comments) 20-year anniversary of this blog (9 comments) Supporting Bayesian modeling workflows with iterative filtering for multiverse analysis (9 comments) That day in 1977 when Jerzy Neyman committed the methodological attribution fallacy. (9 comments) Plagiarism searches and post-publication review (9 comments) Physics is like Brazil, Statistics is like Chile (9 comments) Progress in 2023, Aki’s software edition (8 comments) Learning from mistakes (my online talk for the American Statistical Association, 2:30pm Tues 30 Jan 2024) (8 comments) Lefty Driesell and Bobby Knight (8 comments) There is no golden path to discovery. One of my problems with all the focus on p-hacking, preregistration, harking, etc. is that I fear that it is giving the impression that all will be fine if researchers just avoid “questionable research practices.” And that ain’t the case. (8 comments) How large is that treatment effect, really? (my talk at NYU economics department Thurs 18 Apr 2024, 12:30pm) (8 comments) Delayed retraction sampling (8 comments) “Close but no cigar” unit tests and bias in MCMC (8 comments) Infovis, infographics, and data visualization: My thoughts 12 years later (8 comments) 6 ways to follow this blog (8 comments) For that price he could’ve had 54 Jamaican beef patties or 1/216 of a conference featuring Gray Davis, Grover Norquist, and a rabbi (8 comments) Break it to grok it: The best way to understand how a method works is go construct scenarios where it fails (8 comments) Loving, hating, and sometimes misinterpreting conformal prediction for medical decisions (8 comments) Here’s a useful response by Christakis to criticisms of the contagion-of-obesity claims (8 comments) Here is the Data Sharing Statement, in its entirety, for Goodwin GM, Aaronson ST, Alvarez O, et al. Single-Dose Psilocybin for a Treatment-Resistant Episode of Major Depression. N Engl J Med. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2206443. (8 comments) Progress in 2023, Jessica Edition (7 comments) Storytelling and Scientific Understanding (my talks with Thomas Basbøll at Johns Hopkins on 26 Apr) (7 comments) Listen to those residuals (7 comments) When do we expect conformal prediction sets to be helpful? (7 comments) Hey! A new (to me) text message scam! Involving a barfing dog! (7 comments) Michael Lewis. (7 comments) Free online book by Bruno Nicenboim, Daniel Schad, and Shravan Vasishth on Bayesian inference and hierarchical modeling using brms and Stan (7 comments) Minor-league Stats Predict Major-league Performance, Sarah Palin, and Some Differences Between Baseball and Politics (7 comments) How to code and impute income in studies of opinion polls? (7 comments) How often is there a political candidate such as Vivek Ramaswamy who is so much stronger in online polls than telephone polls? (7 comments) Banning the use of common sense in data analysis increases cases of research failure: evidence from Sweden (7 comments) “Bayesian Workflow: Some Progress and Open Questions” and “Causal Inference as Generalization”: my two upcoming talks at CMU (7 comments) Decorative statistics and historical records (7 comments) Some fun basketball graphs (7 comments) “A Columbia Surgeon’s Study Was Pulled. He Kept Publishing Flawed Data.” . . . and it appears that he’s still at Columbia! (7 comments) He wants to compute “the effect of a predictor” (that is, an average predictive comparison) for a hierarchical mixture model. You can do it in Stan! (7 comments) Luck vs. skill in poker (7 comments) Basu’s Bears (Fat Bear Week and survey calibration) (7 comments) Flatiron Institute hiring: postdocs, joint faculty, and permanent research positions (7 comments) Violent science teacher makes ridiculously unsupported research claims, gets treated by legislatures/courts/media as expert on the effects of homeschooling (7 comments) Should pollsters preregister their design, data collection, and analyses? (7 comments) Calibration for everyone and every decision problem, maybe (7 comments) Iterative imputation and incoherent Gibbs sampling (7 comments) Data manipulation in the world of long-distance swimming! (7 comments) Announcing two new members of our blogging team . . . (7 comments) Progress in 2023, Aki Edition (6 comments) Michael Wiebe has several new replications written up on his site. (6 comments) The importance of measurement, and how you can draw ridiculous conclusions from your statistical analyses if you don’t think carefully about measurement . . . Leamer (1983) got it. (6 comments) Cherry blossoms—not just another prediction competition (6 comments) Tutorial on varying-intercept, varying-slope multilevel models in Stan, from Will Hipson (6 comments) Mitzi’s and my talks in Trieste 3 and 4 June 2024 (yes, they’ll be broadcast) (6 comments) One way you can understand people is to look at where they prefer to see complexity. (6 comments) Edward Kennedy on the Facebook/Instagram 2020 election experiments (6 comments) Last week’s summer school on probabilistic AI (6 comments) Toward a Shnerbian theory that establishes connections between the complexity (nonlinearity, chaotic dynamics, number of components) of a system and the capacity to infer causality from datasets (6 comments) The “fail fast” principle in statistical computing (6 comments) Two job openings, one in New York on data visualization, one near Paris on Bayesian modeling (6 comments) An apparent paradox regarding hypothesis tests and rejection regions (6 comments) What’s a generative model? PyMC and Stan edition (6 comments) “Announcing the 2023 IPUMS Research Award Winners” (6 comments) Pete Rose (6 comments) eLife press release: Deterministic thinking led to a nonsensical statement (6 comments) “Reduce likelihood of a tick bite by 73.6 times”? Forking paths on the Appalachian Trail. (6 comments) Delicate language for talking about statistical guarantees (6 comments) It’s about time (5 comments) A gathering of the literary critics: Louis Menand and Thomas Mallon, meet Jeet Heer (5 comments) Why we say that honesty and transparency are not enough: (5 comments) Statistical practice as scientific exploration (5 comments) Analogy between (a) model checking in Bayesian statistics, and (b) the self-correcting nature of science. (5 comments) Population forecasting for small areas: an example of learning through a social network (5 comments) Data challenges with the Local News Initiative mapping project (5 comments) Lucy is not a nickname. (5 comments) “The Secret Life of John Le Carré” (5 comments) Evil scamming fake publishers (5 comments) The Mets are looking to hire a data scientist (5 comments) Why art is more forgiving than game design (5 comments) Salesses: “some writing exercises meant to help students with various elements of craft” (5 comments) StanCon 2024 Oxford: recorded talks are now released! (5 comments) Code it! (patterns in data edition) (5 comments) Softmax is on the log, not the logit scale (5 comments) “My view is that if I can show that a result was cooked and that doing it correctly does not yield the answer the authors claimed, then the result is discredited. . . . What I hear, instead, is the following . . .” (4 comments) Lancet-bashing! (4 comments) Bayesian Analysis with Python (4 comments) Bayesian inference with informative priors is not inherently “subjective” (4 comments) Here’s something you should do when beginning a project, and in the middle of a project, and in the end of the project: Clearly specify your goals, and also specify what’s not in your goal set. (4 comments) “When are Bayesian model probabilities overconfident?” . . . and we’re still trying to get to meta-Bayes (4 comments) “Often enough, scientists are left with the unenviable task of conducting an orchestra with out-of-tune instruments” (4 comments) Studying causal inference in the presence of feedback: (4 comments) They’re trying to get a hold on the jungle of cluster analysis. (4 comments) “Beyond the black box: Toward a new paradigm of statistics in science” (talks this Thursday in London by Jessica Hullman, Hadley Wickham, and me) (4 comments) Interactive and Automated Data Analysis: thoughts from Di Cook, Hadley Wickham, Jessica Hullman, and others (4 comments) (This one’s important:) Looking Beyond the Obvious: Essentialism and abstraction as central to our reasoning and beliefs (4 comments) “The Waltz of Reason” and a paradox of book reviewing (4 comments) StanCon 2024… is a wrap! (4 comments) 22 Revision Prompts from Matthew Salesses (4 comments) Two spans of the bridge of inference (4 comments) Average predictive comparisons (4 comments) Gayface Data Replicability Problems (4 comments) Addressing legitimate counterarguments in a scientific review: The challenge of being an insider (4 comments) Most popular posts of 2024 (4 comments) What is the minimum bloggable contribution? (4 comments) What to trust in the newspaper? Example of “The Simple Nudge That Raised Median Donations by 80%” (3 comments) Bayesian BATS to advance Bayesian Thinking in STEM (3 comments) Intro to BridgeStan: The new in-memory interface for Stan (3 comments) Storytelling and Scientific Understanding (my talks with Thomas Basbøll at Johns Hopkins this Friday) (3 comments) Evaluating MCMC samplers (3 comments) Applied modelling in drug development? brms! (3 comments) GPT today: Buffon’s Needle in Python with plotting (and some jokes) (3 comments) Comedy and child abuse in literature (3 comments) Cross validation and pointwise or joint measures of prediction accuracy (3 comments) A guide to detecting AI-generated images, informed by experiments on people’s ability to detect them (3 comments) Free Textbook on Applied Regression and Causal Inference (3 comments) Free Book of Stories, Activities, Computer Demonstrations, and Problems in Applied Regression and Causal Inference (3 comments) Close reading in literary criticism and statistical analysis (3 comments) GIST: Now with local step size adaptation for NUTS (3 comments) Should you always include a varying slope for the lower-level variable involved in a cross-level interaction? (3 comments) 3 levels of fraud: One-time, Linear, and Exponential (3 comments) Postdoc position at Northwestern on evaluating AI/ML decision support (3 comments) The marginalization or Jeffreys-Lindley paradox: it’s already been resolved. (3 comments) They solved the human-statistical reasoning interface back in the 80s (2 comments) “Replicability & Generalisability”: Applying a discount factor to cost-effectiveness estimates. (2 comments) Leap Day Special! (2 comments) Postdoc Opportunity at the HEDCO Institute for Evidence-Based Educational Practice in the College of Education at the University of Oregon (2 comments) GIST: Gibbs self-tuning for HMC (2 comments) “Former dean of Temple University convicted of fraud for using fake data to boost its national ranking” (2 comments) Update on “the hat”: It’s “the spectre,” a single shape that can tile the plane aperiodically but not periodically, and doesn’t require flipping (2 comments) New online Stan course: 80 videos + hosted live coding environment (2 comments) In Stan, “~” should be called a “distribution statement,” not a “sampling statement.” (2 comments) Forking paths and workflow in statistical practice and communication (2 comments) Doctoral student positions in Bayesian workflow at Aalto, Finland (2 comments) Election prediction markets: What happens next? (2 comments) Oregon State Stats Dept. is Hiring (2 comments) Hey, journalist readers! Does anyone have a contact at NPR? (2 comments) “My quick answer is that I don’t care much about permutation tests because they are testing a null null hypothesis that is of typically no interest” (1 comments) “Theoretical statistics is the theory of applied statistics”: A scheduled conference on the topic (1 comments) Progress in 2023, Charles edition (1 comments) A question about Lindley’s supra Bayesian method for expert probability assessment (1 comments) Those annoying people-are-stupid narratives in journalism (1 comments) ISBA 2024 Satellite Meeting: Lugano, 25–28 June (1 comments) My NYU econ talk will be Thurs 18 Apr 12:30pm (NOT Thurs 7 Mar) (1 comments) Is the 2024 New York presidential primary really an “important election”? (1 comments) Fully funded doctoral student positions in Finland (1 comments) “Randomization in such studies is arguably a negative, in practice, in that it gives apparently ironclad causal identification (not really, given the ultimate goal of generalization), which just gives researchers and outsiders a greater level of overconfidence in the claims.” (1 comments) Supporting Bayesian modelling workflows with iterative filtering for multiverse analysis (1 comments) No, I don’t believe the claim that “Mothers negatively affected by having three daughters and no sons, study shows.” (1 comments) He has some questions about a career in sports analytics. (1 comments) Questions and Answers for Applied Statistics and Multilevel Modeling (1 comments) StanCon 2024: scholarships, sponsors, and other news (1 comments) 19 ways of looking at data science at the singularity, from David Donoho and 17 others (1 comments) A message to Christian Hesse, mathematician and author of chess books (1 comments) Online seminar for Monte Carlo Methods++ (1 comments) Faculty positions at the University of Oregon’s new Data Science department (1 comments) “Tough choices in election forecasting: All the things that can go wrong” (my webinar this Friday 11am with the Washington Statistical Society) (1 comments) Call for StanCon 2025+ (1 comments) What should Yuling include in his course on statistical computing? (1 comments) Calibration “resolves” epistemic uncertainty by giving predictions that are indistinguishable from the true probabilities. Why is this still unsatisfying? (1 comments) Since Jeffrey Epstein is in the news again . . . (0 comments) Postdoc at Washington State University on law-enforcement statistics (0 comments) Here’s how to subscribe to our new weekly newsletter: (0 comments) Progress in 2023, Leo edition (0 comments) Click here to help this researcher gather different takes on making data visualizations for blind people (0 comments) Using the term “visualization” for non-visual representation of data (0 comments) Varying slopes and intercepts in Stan: still painful in 2024 (0 comments) BD corner: I came across this interesting interview with Daniel Clowes on the sources for Monica (0 comments) Hey, some good news for a change! (Child psychology and Bayes) (0 comments) A nested helix plot that simultaneously shows events on the scales of centuries, millennia, . . . all the way back to billions of years (0 comments) Job Ad: Spatial Statistics Group Lead at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (0 comments) Bayesian Workflow, Causal Generalization, Modeling of Sampling Weights, and Time: My talks at Northwestern University this Friday and the University of Chicago on Monday (0 comments) Papers on human decision-making under uncertainty in ML venues! We have advice. (0 comments) New stat podcast just dropped (0 comments) Faculty and postdoc jobs in computational stats at Newcastle University (UK) (0 comments) Subscribe to this free newsletter and get a heads-up on our scheduled posts a week early! (0 comments) “What do we need from a probabilistic programming language to support Bayesian workflow?” (0 comments) StanCon 2024 is in 32 days! (0 comments) NeurIPS 2024 workshop on Statistical Frontiers in LLMs and Foundation Models (0 comments) Faculty positions at the University of California on AI, Inequality, and Society (0 comments) Modeling Weights to Generalize (my talk this Wed noon at the Columbia University statistics department) (0 comments) Bayesian social science conference in Amsterdam! Next month! (0 comments) Postdoc opportunity! to work with me here at Columbia! on Bayesian workflow! for contamination models! With some wonderful collaborators!! (0 comments) NYT catches up to Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science (0 comments) Leave-one-out cross validation (LOO) for an astronomy problem (0 comments) Self-reference and self-reproduction of evidence (0 comments) The Red Sox are hiring (0 comments) Faculty positions at Princeton in interdisciplinary data science (0 comments)

Thank you all for your contributions!