Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
Reading like it’s 1937
Hey Philip Larkin, I don’t get what you were saying here!
Even the easiest data requests can require some effort
Assistant professor positions at USI in Lugano
David Owen writes about hearing aids
Was Admiral Poindexter a terrorist? (Who’s in charge of your prediction market?)
Here’s a statistics research project for you: Is the skewness of the distribution of the empirical correlation coefficient asymptotically proportional to the correlation?
Survey Statistics: individualism doesn’t work
Sabbatical and pre-faculty positions at Flatiron Institute in NYC
Reanalysis of that Nobel prizewinning study of patents and innovation
Bayesian probability, like frequentist probability, is a model-based activity that is mathematically anchored by physical randomization at one end and calibration to a reference set at the other
Collective sensemaking event in NYC, October 26
Aversive statistical methods explain differences in “dark” publication in PNAS across subject areas
The war on data, 2025 edition
Separating the whack from the chaff in critiques of decision theory
The importance of essentialism in children’s and adults’ conceptions of the world
Generalizing Treatment Effects from Trials to EHR Populations (Qixuan Chen’s talk this Tues morning)
“All Our Default Models Are Wrong: Causal inference for varying treatment effects”: my talk this Saturday morning in Ottawa
Questions about statistical claims in paper from recent Nobel prize winners; some general challenges in trying understand nonlinear patterns using quadratic regression
Survey Statistics: MRPW
Stockholm Syndrome
StanCon 2026 in Uppsala, Sweden
“The Impossible Man”: Patchen Barss’s biography of Roger Penrose
This is what a degree in cannabis studies will get ya
7 reasons to use Bayesian inference!
Columbia fake U.S. News statistics update: They paid $9 million and are still, bizarrely, refusing to admit misreporting of data, even though everybody knows they misreported data.
The worst research papers I’ve ever published
Prior distributions for regression coefficients
Selection bias in junk science: Which junk science gets a hearing?
Aki looking for a doctoral student to develop Bayesian workflow
Survey Statistics: struggles with equivalent weights
Historical American Political Finance Data at the National Archives
“300 Paintings”
When rich people believe, or pretend to believe, stupid things (tennis edition)
Uncanny academic valley: Brian Wansink as proto-chatbot
Unusual consulting request
It’s a JAX, JAX, JAX, JAX World
Adding noise to the data to reduce overfitting . . . How does that work?
“It’s horrible that they’re sucking young researchers into this vortex. It’s Gigo and Gresham all the way down.”
Yes, your single vote really can make a difference! (in Canada)
Survey Statistics: beyond balancing
“Dangerous Fictions” and the norm of entertainment
Behind-the-Scenes Seminar on social science this Fri 3 Oct
Game theory corner: did Eric Adams play his hand well? (It’s a little like Murder on the Orient Express, it’s a little like The Sting.)
“Veridical (truthful) Data Science”: Another way of looking at statistical workflow
In music, literature, and technical writing, the relation of large-scale structure to the local action
A Selective History of Political Polling and Election Forecasting
The Dodgers are hiring
“On the poor statistical properties of the P-curve meta-analytic procedure”
More on the decline and fall of Steven Levitt
Survey Statistics: Fat Bear Week
Bridging prediction and intervention in social systems
World’s greatest 404 page
Protecting data from the public and ourselves
It’s JAMA time, baby! Junk science presented as public health research
Who gets listed first on a collaborative article or book?
Monty Hall and generative modeling: Drawing the tree is the most important step
When thinking about causal inference, mechanistic or process models are important. I think that the association of “causal” with black-box models leads to lots of problems.
Condition numbers for HMC and the funnel
More Howl, after Allen Ginsberg for the AI-headed hipsters
“Why probability probably doesn’t exist (but it is useful to act like it does)”
The Miami Marlins are hiring
Hey, Nature magazine! Reputation is a two-way street.
Survey Statistics: random sampling is not leaving
Stats and ML postdoc and permanent hiring season officially open at Flatiron
Softverse: Auto-compute Citations to Software From Replication Files
The Desperation of Causal Inference in Ecology
Princeton Consumer Research reports a 93.94% success rate . . . not quite as good as Harvard, which gets you to “statistically indistinguishable from 100%”!
Helen DeWitt says, “programming occupies a place similar to that of literacy in mediaeval England.”
BDA3 for free
Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the statistics assignment
That external validity question: How to think about a 3-year UBI study?
Hot social science topics 20 years ago and hot social science topics now
Howl, after Allen Ginsberg (for the AI-headed hipsters)
Going beyond naive individualistic models of social science
Survey Statistics: Imputation II
Show, don’t tell: ChatGPT 5 marginalizing Gelman’s measurement error model in Stan
Hypertext as constructed and hypertext as read
You learn about possible plagiarism in a literary work. How does that affect your view of it? (The A. J. Finn story)
This post is not about Newt Gingrich and Fox news, nor is it about Michio Kaku and string theory.
Weighting of evidence and conflict of interest at the FDA and elsewhere
Experimentation and thinking at the level of a program of experiments
Generate but verify: Reconciling the evidence utility of chatbots in many settings with chatbots’ evident lack of understanding
Blogging’s a great way to express your ideas.
“Assembling an unbiased jury”?