Watch the full conversation here: zeteo.com/p/abdul-el-s...

Probably 10 times a day (at least) I run into some form of this "not significant therefore null is true" problem. There were many, many problems in the undergrad stats course I took, but one positive is they repeated a million "you cannot accept the null hypothesis."

🚨Wow - this will be huge if it bears out. Exit polls show the pro-EU D66 party has WON the Dutch election. The far-right PVV party of Geeet Wildsrs has lost 12 seats, according to exit polls. Huge if true.

Just read a paper that looked for "interactions" of the main exposure with like five different variables. Which me realize that this is basically the same problem as "risk factor" analyses except with interactions instead of main effects.

Qobuz

Factors associated with: problems of using exploratory multivariable regression to identify causal risk factors bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/... I know who'll enjoy reading this: @jeremylabrecque.bsky.social

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

In the past few months, I've stopped supporting all major US corporations (e.g. subscriptions). I thought it was going to be annoying but instead I've discovered so many better options like Qobuz for music streaming (which pays artists 4x more) and Infomaniak for file storage. Pure wins.

POV: The new singer of the Reading Rainbow theme song and the new host of Reading Rainbow meet for the first time in Canada 🥹📚🌈 Video Description: Mychal and Bukola meet for the first time! They joyfully dance to the Reading Rainbow theme song, sung by Bukola ✨ youtube.com/@kidzuko?feature=shared

Are there earlier occurrences of groups being established to archive biological data to make them available for future analyses by researchers than this, which is from The British Association Committee on Biological Measurements, 1927?

Great piece on the absurdity of brute force multiverse analyses. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Research is mostly discovering cleaner ways to express what you overcomplicated yesterday

The recording is now available so that you can confirm that I indeed have a German accent and color-match my outfits with my Zoom background. youtu.be/YL0co26ng-g?...

Good thing it doesn’t fall near April 27 which is King’s Day here in the Netherlands. That would be awkward

Lol that the London No Kings event is called No Tyrants because…you know… www.nokings.org#map

Most graphs of the fertility rate depict the 'period fertility rate', which is based on a single year's data and doesn't necessarily reflect how many children women actually have across their lifetimes. I've used data from the Human Fertility Database to show the cumulative number instead:

Science is grounded in observation. Measurement is a tool for observation. Measurements should be evaluated for validity and reliability/uncertainty. Scientists who use measurements without understanding their properties are not really scientists at all.

Since the Ezra & Ta-Nehisi discussion is still happening: the main point I think most are missing is that Klein is saying the role of the journalist-intellectual is to do strategic politics, whereas Coates says the role of the journalist-intellectual is to tell the truth

One reason I oppose associational or other non-causal language in research questions is it lets people think they don't need causal inference to answer causal questions. (When the underlying question is causal, of course. Which it almost always is.)

I'm gonna be saying "was silence not an option?" from now on

Congrats to Moldova!!! Russia threw everything to destabilize the election and failed spectacularly. Democracy won 🙌🏼

So exhausting..

And to be fair, many academic journals also ban "causal" words like effect/impact/due to.

Canada Post “lost” 1 billion dollars last year? How about, “it cost Canadians 1 billion dollars to have a national postal service” which works out to costing about $25 a year per person (population of Canada in 2024 = 40 million). Seems like a pretty reasonable cost to me.

This is not because AI is generally useless. It is a tool that has to be carefully tested for possible uses and implemented in ways that create a net benefit. Like all tools. This is not happening. So it may point to the possibility that a lot of business decision makers are useless.

People are making Rapture jokes like there's no tomorrow

Demystifying Clone‐Censor‐Weighting to Studying Treatment Initiation Windows: An Example Using Publicly Available Synthetic Medicare Claims Data - Webster‐Clark - 2025 - Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety - Wiley Online Library

A sentence I just read in a published study: "By identifying and adjusting for biases such as confounding, selection bias, and information bias, epidemiologists accurately estimate the genuine relationship between exposures and outcomes" ...the genuine relationship...

Currently attending a conference & our field is quite a bit into fancy modeling, so it’s time to repost this blog post. Don’t try to squeeze your research question into whatever model is fashionable right now; try to build the right model for your research question. www.the100.ci/2024/08/27/l...

Oligarchs are working overtime: To destabilize any ability you and I have to govern ourselves. To foster unrest. To attack democracy. To destroy checks and balances. To remove privacy and private communications. To poison the information ecosystem. Nothing to do with "right" vs "left".

Question to academics and PhD students: Does your department have a protocol defence or proposal evaluation for early year PhD students? And if so, what do they look like?

Question to academics and PhD students: Does your department have a protocol defence or proposal evaluation for early year PhD students? And if so, what do they look like?

It feels like a lot of people in the world these days are using Pascal’s wager but to get to hell

Brilliant piece on how to engage in conversation with strangers about vaccines and public health @statnews.com @unbiasedscipod.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2025/09/06/c...

Science is messy. Data are messy. Results are messy. Conclusions are messy. The one thing that you have complete control over and therefore should not be messy is your research question.

There's something deeply intellectually satisfying about taking something that is highly technical and breaking it down to the point that even non-technical people can follow along and derive some own intellectual satisfaction from it.

When you're not an expert on something, it's hard to know which experts to trust. But these days there are many "experts" saying stuff that is so easily disproved with a simple search, that there's no excuse for anyone to believe anything they say.

Universal basic income is UNIVERSAL. That's a key detail. You can do a pilot that provides unconditional cash to a thousand people, but unless they all live in the same small town of 1,000 people, it's not truly testing UBI. That's where we see the big impacts, like boosted local GDP and less crime.

Applications are now open! We are recruiting 20 Assistant Professors in a wide range of subject areas. We're looking for early-career researchers with strong scientific merits and future potential. 🔗 All positions: ki.se/en/about-ki/...

I think about this quote a lot...

This was the infant mortality rate in the Netherlands 50 YEARS AGO

“The Mississippi health department declared a public health emergency Thursday over rising infant mortality rates in the state. There were 9.7 deaths for every 1,000 births in Mississippi in 2024, the highest rate in more than a decade, according to a news release from the state health department.”

What the heck is 'the longitudinal association'? I see the term used in many lifecourse epidemiology studies. I have no idea what it means. Cc @jeremylabrecque.bsky.social

The biggest trick the devil ever pulled is to call LLMs “artificial intelligence.”

Lots of different ways to do observational causal inference—IV, proximal inference, etc. What if you could compare those strategies more directly? New preprint w/ @melodyyhuang.bsky.social tries to do just that. Here's one cool figure—we're able to visualize bias of 3 estimators on the same plot

I'm astonished by the similarities between Lysenko (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_...) and the charlatans we have working in the federal US health institutions now. Overconfidence from minor successes, an astonishing, dangerous attachment to stupid viewpoints, and chance support from politicians

I increasingly believe that having that much money distorts one's human interactions such that billionaires are in a constant state of progressive moral decay. The option to avoid this fate by philanthropically disposing of your gross excess assets is permanently available yet rarely exercised.

This is outrageous. Cubans and Venezuelans who came to the U.S. *legally*—fleeing socialism & communism—are being fast-tracked for deportation by the Trump administration without so much as a hearing. I wrote about some of them. Anyone who claims to hate those oppressive regimes can't defend this:

The CEO of a a multi-trillion dollar company went to the White House, openly handed the US president a gift made of gold, and his company got a special exemption to tariffs the president has illegally imposed. Also, the Founders took bribery so seriously the Constitution bans it 3 separate times.