Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
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 measurment 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”?
“William Burroughs said that you should never trust anyone who looked the same from photo to photo”
Survey Statistics: connections to experimental design
Who cares when a research claim is found to be in error? Peer-reviewed journals do their best to deflect and dilute legitimate criticism.
“The Story Paradox”
Thank you, Perspectives on Psychological Science, for finally getting your act together.
It’s . . . Orwellian!
The mantra and mania of data sharing
The War on Data, 2025 edition
How will/should LLMs change how organizations do strategy?
“Of all people who most recently tied the knot 50 or more years ago, and who haven’t yet died, X percent have made it this far without divorcing or becoming widowed” . . . What is X?
Aiming your gatling guns in the wrong direction. Shooting the messenger for something the messenger was never saying.
Survey Statistics: Thomas Lumley writes about Interviewing your Laptop
A suggestion for Freakonomics and Sean Carroll: Interview Nick Brown
New instructor resources for Llaudet and Imai’s book, Data Analysis for Social Science
What writing a failed rock-paper-scissors program taught me (or should have taught me) about sample size and uncertainty
Chatbot still can’t handle tic-tac-toe
My thoughts on L. A. Paul’s “Transformative Experience”
Fake-data simulation as posterior predictive checking: A formalization of the folk theorem of statistical computing!
For which cases does AI help with classification (medical diagnosis example)? “The narrow beach between the continent of clear effects and the sea of confusion”
“I guess my question is how bad must it be before retraction becomes appropriate?”
Survey Statistics: answers from the BLS
The Edlin factor strikes again: “The crown jewel of the Nudge literature finds its effect cut by 76%”
Steering a middle ground between two extreme takes on the role of statistics in the development of language models
Two cool math lectures by Yuval Peres
Pivoting to new funding sources in light of new government regulations
When does it make sense to talk about LLMs having beliefs?
What’s on your university’s home page?
Feynman corner: We have access to a lot more examples than we used to.
Autism junk science: The only part of this story that surprises me is that the outside critic “found it hard to believe just how flawed it turned out to be”
Survey Statistics: 2nd helpings of the 2nd flavor of calibration
Hey! Here’s what to do when you have two or more surveys on the same population! (Combining survey data obtained using different modes of sampling)
The oldest famous person
The rise and fall of Bayesian statistics
Art Buchwald would be spinning in his grave
White House / NYC Mayoral Race strategy: Life imitates blog
They’re looking for businesses that want to use their Bayesian inference software, I think?
Real examples are good (mile run example)
“Beyond Averages: Measuring Consistency and Volatility in NBA Player and Team Offense”
Two philosophers A political science professor and a priest lie about a position taken by a philosopher.
Survey Statistics: BLS Jobs Report
A paper by Dorothy Bishop on the replication crisis . . . from 1990!
Should you place more trust in scientists if they are “intellectually humble”?
Uber could use your statistical analysis.
“You can cite peer-reviewed research in support of almost any claim, no matter how absurd.”
Measurement error in the strike zone
Is atheism like a point null hypothesis? and other thoughts on religion
Controversy over different estimates of covid origins probabilities
(1) Fitting hierarchical models in genetics, (2) A Stan model that runs faster with 400,000 latent parameters, (3) Super-scalable penalized maximum likelihood inference for biome problems, (4) “In the end, I basically gave up working on biology because of the politics.”
Resolving Simpson’s paradox using poststratification
Using hierarchical modeling to get more stable rankings of gene expression
Survey Statistics: adjusting for interest in politics
Bordwell’s Perplexing Plots
Israel/Palestine and political opinion-field inversion
Trump and Epstein; Biden and Afghanistan; and the permission structure of public opinion