Data collected. Theories formed into models. The aim, to find truth.

As if I haven't banged on about enough by now... looking forward to continuing to talk about how developing and trying to test strong theories is a pretty damned useful way of going about doing science. Here's my abstract for the 8th Perspectives on Scientific Error Workshop in Leiden, NL. #PSE8

We've got ISSUES. Literally. We scraped >100k special issues & over 1 million articles to bring you a PISS-poor paper. We quantify just how many excess papers are published by guest editors abusing special issues to boost their CVs. How bad is it & what can we do? arxiv.org/abs/2601.07563 A 🧵 1/n

Sign up now for the Perspectives on Scientific Error Conference (PSE) on 11 - 13 Feb in Leiden, the Netherlands We will be hosting a mentor-mentee lunch during the conference. Sign up, and you will be matched to another academic based on shared research interests! Don't miss out! See you there 🙌

A quick meta-analytic* estimate of QRPs across surveys added to @lakens.bsky.social collation of results from them (lakens.github.io/statistical_... pull request made). Red line is the point estimate (intervals are tiny so not plotted) *meta-analysis of proportions using the logit transformation

You can sign up until January 23 for the free Paul Meehl Graduate School workshop on Scientific Criticism and Peer review taught by René Bekkers. It promises to be an extremely interesting day, so do join us in Eindhoven on January 30th! paulmeehlschool.github.io/workshops/cr...

Some people bring up (1) the cost of criticism and (2) that a lot of criticism has already been voiced but ignored. Both points are valid, so here are some suggestion for (1) reducing backlash and (2) increasing impact (from this talk of mine: juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

Here’s a bit of personal data and some reflections, more for fun than anything too serious. See full post on IG - www.instagram.com/p/DS7NpusDEm... You can access the data, and code used to prepare and analyse it as well as make the plots at the GitHub repository: github.com/jamessteelei...

Here’s a bit of personal data and some reflections, more for fun than anything too serious. See full post on IG - www.instagram.com/p/DS7NpusDEm... You can access the data, and code used to prepare and analyse it as well as make the plots at the GitHub repository: github.com/jamessteelei...

We all make mistakes... often you feel really stupid in hindsight because they were so obvious 😅 1/5

So if performance is our outcome and training our exposure, we have something like training -> performance -> Olympian And we have Training <- other stuff -> Olympian So if we condition on Olympian, we open a back door between Olympian and training

We all make mistakes... often you feel really stupid in hindsight because they were so obvious 😅 1/5

Our paper exploring the role of supervision upon effort during resistance training has now been recommended @pci-hms.bsky.social after a valuable review process. Final version: sportrxiv.org/index.php/se... Recommendation: healthmovsci.peercommunityin.org/articles/rec...

Not looked in detail but a quick glance at this new nudge effects meta and things look a little odd... doi.org/10.1002/bdm....

remember when clicking buttons in SPSS was as bad as it could get

youtube.com/shorts/SskQN... Tis the no p-hacking season

Seeing Expedition 33 clean up at The Game Awards fills me with joy 😊 So deserving... I genuinely feel fortunate to have been able to experience it.

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

Was kinda forced by circumstance into switching to an iPhone after being a bit of an apple hater for almost 20 years... I hate to say it but, I kinda like the iPhone 17.

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

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So, folks might recall the great BMR series of articles from the MacroFactor team last year. One of the articles tackled the challenges women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) face with respect to managing their weight, and claims that this is in part due to "slower metabolism" 🧵1/7

I've been exposed to enough peer review that I think we can look at two classes of reviewers: 1. Constructive peer review 2. Adversarial peer review I'm looking at this mostly from a psychology/methodology perspective (but wonder what other fields experience) 🧵 1/

Just had our first set of reviews from @pci-regreports.bsky.social for our proposed study on RT during GLP-1-RA treatment. Probably the most constructive and useful set of reviews I have ever had... and having them before starting the study makes them even better! 11/10 would recommend!

I saw someone post a critical take on the consumer reports protein and lead piece a while back but I can't find it. For some reason I vaguely recall it being @scientificdiscovery.dev but I can't find it on your feed. Does anyone remember this?

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting next year? I'm hiring for a position at the University of Witten/Herdecke. uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/61280592...

Sometimes I think the best indicator of whether your field of research is in so called "crisis" is if, when you look around, you come away thinking "jfc... people are doing shitty work in this field" 😅

JFC tickets for A Painted Symphony in London sold out in like 3 minutes!

We just preprinted a huge meta-meta-analysis examining the effects of exercise on cognition, memory, and executive function In short - 2239 effect sizes - extreme between-study heterogeneity - extensive publication bias - some subgroup/exercise-specific effects More below (doi.org/10.31234/osf...)

New preprint 🎉 Living systematic reviews ensure evidence stays current osf.io/preprints/ps... In this brief comment (all four pages are here ⬇️), @iaiversen.bsky.social and I cover the benefits and challenges of living systematic reviews, along with two ways to increase their uptake 🧵 1/8

Rare painting of Tommy Wiseau in front of the Buttercross in Winchester High Street (spotted in gents loo in The Bishop on the Bridge) 😏

This is the sort of thing I want to be reading in journal submission guidelines... don't make me put the important details in the supplemental materials.

I don't know how I've missed it because it's *right on the documentation home page*, but if you use {glue} for nice string interpolation in #rstats and you have {stringr} loaded (likely through the tidyverse), you can use str_glue() instead of glue::glue() or loading library(glue) glue.tidyverse.org

A month later and I am still thinking about it...

🚨 New working paper! How well do people predict the results of studies? @sdellavi.bsky.social and I leverage data from the first 100 studies to have been posted on the SSPP, containing 1,482 key questions, on which over 50,000 forecasts were placed. Some surprising results below.... 🧵👇

Here's a presentation tip and something I've started doing recently 👇🏻

PSA: Observed outcomes after an intervention vary and this does not necessarily mean there is interindividual heterogeneity in the underlying causal effect of the intervention. Further, finding predictors of observed outcomes does not mean you have found predictors of any underlying causal effects.

There's got to be SOME hypothesis that makes our experiment useless. THINK! COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/stats-3 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

1. Ran Tian: Statistical Practice in Sport and Exercise Science: A Meta-Research Study. We studied 146 studies. Most used multilevel models or t-tests/correlations/ANOVA. In 27% the wrong methods were used (statistical test did not match data structure). Collaborate with a statistician! #AIMOS2025

Always check your priors on the scale with which you intend to interpret things folks!

Finland bound to preach the gospel of The Black Pill and myth of intervention effect heterogeneity 😁

Confusing stats language: The "linear" is linear regression means "linear in the parameters". It does not mean "can only fit straight lines", and things like polynomials and splines can be included in linear models. online.stat.psu.edu/stat501/less... 1/2

Two-group pre/post data are deceptively simple, and you could analyze them in many different ways, depending on your goals. Here are three blog posts on the topic: solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2022-06... solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2020-12... solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2023-06...

Goddamit, my stiches itch... wait a minute! St-itch-es 🤔

Anyone have a copy of the following (pic because citation too long for character limit, also see alt text).

I've made the decision to step down from all editorial positions at journals. Mostly due to shifting personal and professional situation, priorities, and wanting to avoid the psychological burden of obligation such formal roles tend to bring me...

New 'Preliminary Report' submission format at Science and Medicine in Football. An idea that should be interesting for other journals! Explicitly make space for honestly reported smaller sample-size studies www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Ah man, just got reminded about that methods paper on Item Response Theory for measurement of sporting abilities that I had on my to do list to write a few years back and never got round to. We did some initial work with Elite Skills Arena and presented the results at the BASES conference in 2022.

Honestly, the film was soo good... watched twice in the cinema and if it was still on here in the UK I would go watch again in a heartbeat #chainsawman #rezearc