i prefer the term "podcast intellectuals" all gotcha hot takes, no technical depth

New paper "To select or not to select: predictively consistent priors instead of model selection" with Anna Elisabeth Riha, Leevi Lindgren, @davidkohns.bsky.social, @paulbuerkner.com arxiv.org/abs/2606.22850 Model selection is not a substitute for building good models in the first place 1/

bring back old academic twitter controversies to bsky 😈

Finally out in Psychological Review (psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/...), our update to Signal Detection Theory. We show that contrary to the prevailing Gaussian assumption, evidence distributions in recognition memory are likely minimum extreme Gumbel!

Finally, our paper is out! Together with @aliciafrancomnez.bsky.social, Javier Revuelta, and @mavadillo.bsky.social, we extend hierarchical factor models for skewed RTs and task validation, now in Psychological Methods: doi.org/10.1037/met0... Let me briefly explain what we did and why it matters!

I'm really excited to share a new preprint! Lab studies have consistently shown that stress and negative emotions make people drink alcohol, but studies of daily life (EMA) keep failing to find it. What does that mean for the shared theoretical prediction both designs test? osf.io/preprints/ps...

Historically the word "salad" simply refers to a mixture of chopped cold foods combined with a dressing Therefore, a bowl of cereal with milk is a salad. I call it wheat salad with a milk dressing.

i have a fun one cooking, stay tuned this next week 🤓

dip-leer

Two recommendations for cmdstanr in case studies: 1) use sample(..., refresh=0) to avoid 80 lines of MCMC progress reporting 2) cmdstanr::print_stan_file() in Quarto with output asis to get color formatting ``` #| output: asis print_stan_file(stan_file) ``` e.g., avehtari.github.io/Bayesian-Wor...

here is the full sequence 🤓

Happy New Year! It is the Year of the Fire Horse. I want to use this turn of the year to share that as of today, I have stepped down from my position as Associate Professor at @durhampsych.bsky.social and will now serve full time as director of my non-profit, @thesolitudelab.bsky.social,...

giving a talk later this year and this is gonna be so fun

the "methods" section is the only thing that separates science from journalism

reach out if you or someone you knows wants to chat about doing some modeling together 🤓 my focus is primarily on modeling behavioral paradigms and self-report measures—either together, separately, or even longitudinally bayesianbeginnings.com/?v=2

some big news! hBayesDM has now been fully ported to cmdstan/cmdstanr/cmdstanpy check out the PR below, or the changelog for an overview: PR: github.com/CCS-Lab/hBay... Changelog: ccs-lab.github.io/hBayesDM/new... stay tuned for some additional features coming soon, including covariate support 🤓

i like the approach here tbh it's rather extreme, but warranted if you can't be bothered to do some basic due diligence on papers whose purpose is to spread knowledge there are plenty of forums for non fact checked, sloppy writing anyway

same but influencer -> psych researcher 4 humors -> big 5

even if llms are only good at local interpolation, i think it's easy to lose sight of how vast (and sparse) the sample space is, and therefore how useful even minor interpolation can be

some Bayesian cognitive modeling students are having trouble seeing the industry-relevance of the methods (my worked out examples are research based, since it's what I do). Tips for good industry examples? @ajordannafa.com @natehaines.bsky.social @rmcelreath.bsky.social @avehtari.bsky.social

📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268

disqus just started lighting up my blog comment section with ads unfortunate probably going to just delete the comment section this weekend 😬

TBF this is a trend that has been going on for quite some time. Statistical software has become so user friendly that you can do some rather complex analyses these days without truly understanding your model Is this a net bad? Hard to say. It’s on users to do their due diligence IMO

one day I will convince folks to actually use their reliability estimates and not simply report them... one day...

it’s hard to overstate how important this is for quantitative research (especially psychology/neuroscience)- computing individual-level stats independently often robs you of hard earned statistical power. highly recommended reading *both* of these wonderful blog posts!

And in what is my favorite figure ever, we look into how shrinkage impacts person-level means in both the univariate and multivariate case:

Part 2 of my shrinkage estimator series is out! Part 1 covered the univariate case, but now we dive into multivariate shrinkage 🤓 We cover Spearman's classic correlation disattenuation formula, multivariate James-Stein estimators, and hierarchical methods too haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

guys i got a review request for a paper exploring if LLMs can instantiate "computations of psychopathology" wut

Nutpie: state-of-the-art mass matrix adaptation for HMC statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/20/n...

One of my main scientific regrets is not having used my time to learn more statistics. Learning new statistical approaches next to general postdoc work is not very sustainable. However, fantastic blog posts such as this one by @natehaines.bsky.social really help! haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

good bayesians don't let their friends do NHST with bayes factors

my favorite part of this table is the implication that the best estimators are essentially those that leverage priors frequentists try really hard to avoid the concept of a prior, and yet... if you have ever fit a hierarchical model you are practically Bayesian 😈

New blog just dropped! This one is all about estimators—we cover James-Stein, classical test theory, empirical Bayes, penalized regression, and hierarchical models, showing how they all can be used to do a better job than sample stats alone 🤓 haines-lab.com/post/how-to-...

An aside—LLMs have basically solved data viz for me. What used to take a good bit of tinkering in ggplot or plotly now can be one-shotted with a data snippet/schema as context and a plain English description of what I want. The bar for data viz is now higher 🤓

In case you missed it 🤓

1/9 New blog is live! This is part 2 of a series—last time we looked at the Dunning-Kruger effect, now we are digging in to Implicit vs Explicit attitudes and the Implicit Association Test. To start, of course we need a good meme... haines-lab.com/post/part-2-...

coming soon! part 2 of the series (finally..), this time looking at implicit attitudes instead of the Dunning-Kruger effect—here is a sneak peek 🤓

when McElreath drops new videos you watch, and it is always so worth it look at this awesome graph, no better way to illustrate how cool hierarchical Bayes is 😍 youtu.be/jh3RltVrQ-Q?...

tank mom

New paper & a thread on the results 👇 ‘Reward-specific learning parameters change across normative adolescent development and are blunted in youth with high risk for depression’ acamh-onlinelibrary-wiley-com.ezp3.lib.umn.edu/doi/full/10....

eyyy survived another year! go team, your citations are appreciated 🙏

cmon guys 2025 doesn't need to be the inflection point, help me out

2026, the year of the landlord special time.com/7338176/pant...

hell yeah

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-... 🧵

just got a restitution check for my auto deductible from back when I got kia boi'd a few years ago.. what a pleasant surprise

awesome post, and couldn't agree more with the thesis R is great because it "just works" most of the time

Job update! It has been a little over a month now, but I'm excited to share that I have joined Oscar Health, where I'm leading a team focused on our clinical risk adjustment process 🤓

wooahh! need to give this a read 🤓