Fun article about “outsider” scientists and their breakthroughs. “Academia filters most funding, publishing, and hiring decisions through senior insiders, which favors ideas within existing paradigms.” worksinprogress.co/issue/why-sc...

Reckon I can submit this as a figure for a paper?

New post: “Marginal” and “conditional” are relative descriptions of an estimand

New paper posted on Arxiv: "When do composite estimands answer non-causal questions?" This can happen more often than you think, and can have a dramatic impact on trial results (e.g. a false-positive rate of almost 90%) arxiv.org/abs/2506.22610 @timpmorris.bsky.social

After two years of trying to avoid this discussion, I just necroed *that thread* on datamethods (discourse.datamethods.org/t/should-one...) in order to share an excellent preprint by philosopher Veli-Pekka Parkkinen (philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24785/1/efme...)

I’m George Takei and I approve of this message.

🤢 horrifying piece of work, which we’ll see idiots quoting. For goodness sake @jclinepi.bsky.social

In economics, editors, referees, and authors often behave as if a published paper should reflect some kind of authoritative consensus. As a result, valuable debate happens in secret, and the resulting paper is an opaque compromise with anonymous co-authors called referees. 1/

People say estimating a causal effect sets the bar unattainably high. But estimating an association is a bar that is literally so low that you can't go under it. Better to aim for what you want and fall short than to, in Homer Simpson's words, "aim so low, no one will even care if you succeed."

The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against approximately two dogs.

Unpopular opinion: Blinded peer review was a mistake. If someone is able to block my paper based on their midwit opinions, they should at the very least be forced to put their name on the review, and publicly stake their reputation on the (false) claim that my work is flawed.

Same. Have no desire to speak ill of the dead, but I wished they had left this sentence out of the obituary: "He will be remembered for his remarkable contributions to the psychology world and as a defender of expression without undue fear of reprisal." Simply not true.

Can anyone point me to a convincing intro to / explanation of ‘in silico’ trials? Everything I’ve read & heard about them just makes the writer/presenter sound nuts. What am I missing??

The Onion should buy Elsevier next

Gotta be honest here, Rhian is one of my favorite authors. I always enjoy her papers so much. I’m currently reading her paper on collapsibility and I feel like this one will be a natural follow up.

One for @andershuitfeldt.bsky.social (icymi) www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles...

This new paper with Rhian Daniel and Daniel Farewell is an excellent opportunity to revive the classic discussions about odds ratios vs other measures of the effect academic.oup.com/jrsssa/artic... #episky #statssky #statistics

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? Most published medical research is essentially junk, and most health professionals aren’t sufficiently trained to tell the difference.

Unwisely concluding that X causes Y because Y tends to follow X needs a better name than this. I suggest: Granger Danger

With #TargetTrial emulation becoming increasingly popular, it's important to understand what it can and can't do. In this podcast I discuss how target trial emulation can improve causal inference from observational data and extend inferences from randomized trials edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/...

New post in which I advocate for signing your peer reviews. As always, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. open.substack.com/pub/tpmorris...

My attempts to convince epidemiologists and biostatisticians about the switch relative risk

‘Estimands: addressing some recent objections’ Just posted this one. As ever, very diplomatic! open.substack.com/pub/tpmorris...

Making every researcher seek grants is a broken model Funding should go to larger labs with many researchers, not to “principal investigators” rootsofprogress.org/... 1/3

Ooh what’s *this* on the BMJ’s front page? ‘The estimands framework: a primer on the ICH E9(R1) addendum’ Kahan, Hindley, Edwards, Cro & Morris @brennankahan.bsky.social www.bmj.com/content/384/...

Have you ever been advised to state your hypothesis in your grant application? Sander Greenland and I argue that stating hypotheses is unnecessary. lnkd.in/eW4ccgae Who cares what you guess the qualitative answer is before doing the study? Just do the study. Your hypothesis is nobody's business.

In a couple of years we will talk about risk factor studies -- putting in a bunch of covariates in a multivariable regression model and declare the significant factors as important "risk factors" for health -- as one of the biggest mistakes in health research