We had a 'data forensics' lab meeting yesterday. We investigated everyone's close-to-submission datasets under the (false) assumption the data was faked & we had to find proof 🔍🧐 We found some mistakes & weirdnesses and it was such a good exercise in good data management! Highly recommend!

This is a good reminder that following the demise of bookdown.org, all of my ebooks are now hosted by quarto.pub. You can find the new links here: bsky.app/profile/solo...

“we are trapping 21st-century minds inside 19th-century academic hierarchies.” This essay gets a lot right about problems with German science. I would add that the hierarchies and precarious contracts lead also to systemic abuse and scientific misconduct. open.substack.com/pub/realimag...

Any sufficiently advanced file-drawer is indistinguishable from p-hacking

Excited to share a new paper with @jfischman, just accepted at JEL. We argue that empirical research tends to be biased and overconfident due to a weakness in the dominant econometric framework: insufficient attention paid to humans “in the loop” with the research process. 1/

New post from me on The 100% CI. Think inside the box, part 1: The guy Euclidean distance told you not to worry about www.the100.ci/2026/03/09/t...

Oh, to publish in a Nature brand journal about how *checks notes* the big math changes to small math.

Curious about how psychological theories are built, tested, and refined in practice? This summer, the Theory Methods Society is launching the very first edition of the summer school Theory Building in Psychology at the University of Amsterdam (July 6–10, 2026). theorymethodssociety.org

If you want to take your mind off awful politics and look at awful science stuff instead, this is a good read: www.sciencedetective.org/scientific-d...

bro just one more future study bro, bro I swear just one more future study and it'll fix the inference bro

One funny effect of pretending that methodological issues can just be ignored because of “future studies” is that it probably prevents those future studies from happening. Like why bother actually addressing hard issues when you can just get away with hand waving?

Hannah Ritchie has built a fun little tool where you can compare energy usage of various products and activities. This is super helpful imho, because it's so hard to develop intuitions even just about the scales involved here. hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-...

"40% of papers about subarachnoid haemorrhage in animals contained manipulated images." We have to face up to the fact that in some fields, over half of published science might be fake.

“Donation after circulatory death donors rose from 118 in 2000 (2% of all donors) to 8129 in 2025 (49%).” Figures are for the US.

The number of organs available for donation has risen massively in the past five years. It seems to be the result of technological advances in preserving organs after circulatory death. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

A nice shift in perceived colour between central and peripheral vision. The fixated disc looks purple while the others look blue. The effect presumably comes from the absence of S-cones in the fovea. From Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.115...

The only feature I miss in Signal compared to WhatsApp was transcription of voice messages. So, I had Claude code a pipeline to do this locally on Mac using sigtop+ffmpeg+whisper at the click of a button. github.com/rubenarslan/...

New newspaper headline for your Intro to Causal Inference lecture just dropped

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

After learning about collider bias, reading this gave me the second-worst existential crisis about learning anything causal from data *even when you can run experiments*. Really a must-read if you’re not already familiar with this stuff.

Per protocol analysis strikes again! Folks, if you randomize but then don‘t analyze some of the people who got randomized (maybe because they didn’t adhere to instructions, maybe because they dropped out), randomization will no longer do all the heavy causal inference lifting.

Always different journals, I should add. Makes me think about @ruben.the100.ci's blog post about a major bug of peer review: www.the100.ci/2020/06/24/m...

We regret to inform you that your paper cannot be considered for publication, but we encourage you to submit it to our GOLD Open Access sister journal

Call for Submissions for the Theory Methods Conference 2026, September 30-October 2! theorymethodssociety.org/conference.h... We invite you to: 1) Submit your proposal: edu.nl/mj9x6 2) Invite your colleagues/lab/(PhD) students, and encourage them to submit 3) Share this post

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This is particularly weird because most of Open Science boils down to: just be honest. Write down in your paper what you actually did. Seems a rather low bar for any science, but apparently pointing this out touches upon a very sensitive issue for some fellow academics.

Since 2020, TOP Factor has helped researchers understand how journals support open practices. On March 16, 2026, COS will be sunsetting the tool. Read more about what prompted the decision, what we've learned, and the future of open and transparent policymaking: www.cos.io/blog/sunsett...

I'm still on the lookout for this, although I've had some leads. My understanding so far is that this hasn't been studied, or written about, from an economic perspective yet.

It's harder to understand reality than we intuitively think

New paper, on a worrying trend in meta-science: the practice of anonymising datasets on, e.g., published articles. We argue that this is at odds with norms established in research synthesis, explore arguments for anonymisation, provide counterpoints, and demonstrate implications and epistemic costs.

New blog post about the age-period-cohort identification problem! In which, for the first time ever, I ask "What's the mechanism?" and also suggest that sometimes you may actually *not* be interested in causal inference. www.the100.ci/2026/02/13/o...

Great post @ruxandrabio.bsky.social on FDA’s refusal to review Moderna’s flu vaccine, changing its position on what trial design was acceptable. Regulatory uncertainty doesn’t just mean missing out on this vaccine, but also reduces future R&D investment: clinicaltrialsabundance.blog/p/the-modern...

Some people confuse correlation and causation, some people confuse causation and “deterministic direct 1:1 causation” 🥲

I learned, in the same semester, how methodological rigor is the bedrock of all progress in psychological science, and that a moderated mediation model based on questionnaires from 86 undergrad students is rock-solid proof for a theory in social psychology.

Is this a thing in other fields too? The (IMO large) bad portion of the psych literature typically violates basic principles that we teach undergrads in intro methods & stats. Feeling increasingly embarrassed when I think of how awful published papers look compared to what I’m asking of my students

Bad news: additional capacity goes to patients who look remarkably similar to those already receiving care. Hence, outcomes are nonreactive. Thus, expanding the workforce doesn't inevitably reach those with the greatest need. 7/n

New meta finds no correlation between testosterone and risk preference, buuuuut testosterone was mainly measured using 2D:4D (nonsense) or saliva (still bad) and we know from Frey et al. 2017 that the risk measures don't tap into a coherent preference. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Do you sometimes think "oh boy, I would really like to hear Julia ramble some more about the topics about which she doesn't stop talking to begin with?" The wait is finally over! @guruspod.bsky.social and had a chat about open science, causal inference, and apparently birth order effects.

Really cool work!

Great talk from @lhdjung.bsky.social at the SwissRN Research-On-Research day on his, our, and other folks' work to develop trustworthiness assessment tools. Finally his {scrutiny} R package has a logo!

Very useful set of books on statistics with R #rstats #StatsSky

Just learned about this study looking at methodological trends in psych and econ over time: online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art.... Matches my perception well: Nobody in psych bothers to (explicitly) try causal inference unless they conducted an experiment, not a lot of theoretical work either.

New blog post introducing Causion - a web app for causal inference teaching and learning: pedermisager.org/blog/causion....

In sum: all global prevalence rates about gaming addiction/disorder seem to be a partial combination of both gaming *and* gambling prevalence. The same applies to other studies, which use gaming measures in relevant languages. Chinese seems to be a major exception.

behold, we found great variation in how people think! Many activities that we thought would be “gaming” weren't & vice versa, eg half of the participants interpreted ‘gambling’ to be ‘gaming’. Ergo: surveying ‘gaming’ without defining it creates data mess

..we then reviewed the next 358 studies to see if we could find more information in papers & public materials. Basically the only case where gambling was excluded was inherent language: ~30% of the studies used Chinese, where confusion shouldn’t exist. Field-wide measurement error is hence ~70%

📣 Our introduction to structural causal models in science studies is now published: doi.org/10.1162/QSS.... @tklebel.bsky.social and I tried to make our introduction as accessible as possible. We illustrate the theory by three case studies based on a simulated model of Open Science. 🧵(1/6)

We looked at 100 IGT studies and found abysmal reporting standards, and 244 different scoring techniques. Applied to a new dataset, the average correlation between these 244 techniques was 0. 5/15 IGT meta-analyses we looked at did not account for this hetereogenity.

Foody et al 2013 has over 130 citations (top 1%) as support for an element of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy's model, but it contains no evidence for that claim. This is a case study in flawed original studies being cited favorably and uncritically until it becomes a common scientific belief.🧵

The raw data is now lost to the sands of time, but a multiverse analysis can still be conducted on the differences between the conditions at post by extracting data from the figures. Results show no differences in means under any set of analytic choices.