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

When you find someone's R package / Shiny app that does the same thing your app does, but with more visualizations! Rarity Roulette verawilde.github.io/rarity-roule... meet riskyr spds.uni-konstanz.de/en/node/1170

wildetruth.substack.com/p/a-little-l... New readings: Feufel on perspicacity vs computation, Hofmann on why consent may be impossible, Eklund on screening smarter not harder, & why my Rarity Roulette pilots may have asked the wrong questions. Come for the mass screenings, stay for the uncertainty!

So what are your favorite recent causal diagram-based analyses of observational and/or mixed (obs + experimental) data? Bonus points for using both DAGs/do-calculus and DCGs/dealing with feedbacks. BONUS bonus points if scaffolding already relates to mass screenings for low-prevalence problems!

This is really interesting. I find it easy to get stuck thinking about problems with existing endpoints. These people are solving some!

V: Someone should make a parody video of "All About That Bass" for Bayes. Internet: Hold my beer. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNz8... Five-year-old: Turn it off.

Pilot 2 results are in for Rarity Roulette, the Bayesian reasoning simulator you need. Hey, what if the educational tool you worked on for years actively made people worse at the thing it teaches? Asking for a friend. verawilde.github.io/rarity-roule... wildetruth.substack.com/p/rarity-rou...

We baked a chocolate chestnut holiday cake from an AI recipe. It was dry, dull, and used too many em dashes.

Mass screenings for low-prevalence problems, bathroom edition: when you check for gray hairs and try to get the one, but it's so rare, uncertain, and you would get too many others, so you give up and post on social media about how you're getting old

Earl Grey tastes like shoe. But, sometimes, you just need a hot cup of shoe.

Performative prediction: The prophecy that causes itself. The screening that changes who it's screening. The dating app that manufactures your "type." If you're into equilibrium effects and other things that break DAGs because life isn't hard enough, enjoy! wildetruth.substack.com/p/all-the-wo...

"Mental health" really just seems like a proxy for "wellbeing" when you read things like this. The organism fails when it suffers abuse and stress, even from impersonal, undirected factors such as pollution or uncertainty of essential support. www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Even highly accurate mass screenings for rare problems generate overwhelmingly false positives. Frequency trees help people grok this better than tables. So I redesigned my risk literacy app (Rarity Roulette) using them. Next up, pilot 2. Science! wildetruth.substack.com/p/rarity-rou...

DuoLingo Hebrew is unusably bad for beginners. I hear good things about Aleph Isn't Tough (book) and Sefaria (free website). Any other suggestions?

Hoppin' John on the table, wet paint on the rack. Happy New Year! There's no goin' back.

The holidays can be very hard for people whose lives don’t fit the postcard version. If that’s you, too: you’re not alone. 🕯️

Does maternal ecology influence offspring gender? I synethesize the contested science, draw DAGs, and share a super simple prototype diet/lifestyle coach built on those sandy foundations. This is really just a concept release. Sanity-check my diagrams... wildetruth.substack.com/p/gender-fud...

Older child's ingenius gingerbread house. Candy-cane reflects AC. Blue candies are a moat. Yogurt raisins, a lemon orchard.

When I read this at 16, it was about sex. Reading it at 41, it's about death. Ouch. poetryarchive.org/poem/shrine-...

Had an NGO ask for my initial plus birthday to anonymize my data. Here's why this is a terrible practice and how they could improve it: wildetruth.substack.com/p/birthday-t... I'm curious: does this reflect a common misunderstanding? What have other people heard about "anonymization" that wasn't?

Russia is clearly winning, so this year's Nutcracker Ballet viewing choice is Mariinsky Theatre: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtLo... Weirdness warning: the wigs! Also: meh wrong tempo, many movements way too slow error.

I do not want to think anymore about my research and how it sucks. I want to think about proposed population screening for type 2 diabetes and how it sucks! nationalscreening.blog.gov.uk/2025/12/08/c...

wildetruth.substack.com/p/the-sins-o... What happens when your Bayesian teaching tool doesn't teach Bayesian reasoning? (Spoiler: wrong; do it again.) Also: why icon arrays beat tables, trees beat both, interactivity is a wildcard, & the next version still won't include the outcome of interest!

The life of the artist “is a constant–and constantly losing–battle to keep at bay...the permanent shortfall of physical and mental abilities in the context of the perfection that art strives to be, and...the inevitable arrival of silence and death.” statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/07/l...

Rooting around for the original of "Skinnamarink" after @dingdingpeng.the100.ci mentioned her husband's 1980s bedtime song for the kids. Turns out it's 47 years old and oh noes my ovaries are turning gray www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFFD...

wildetruth.substack.com/p/rarity-rou... I made an app to help people correct for base rate bias. Does it? Pilot study data say: Maybe, maybe not. I'm inclined to think the table visual aid format may be inferior to frequency-format trees or something else. Any thoughts? References? Anecdata?

I have news. Wonderful news. New paper on #disinformation. The title is the thesis. Think of disinformation as content that functions to optimise the decisions of the audience for the disinformant. This doesn't require deception or content that induces false belief. philpapers.org/rec/LITDIF

Not to be confused with s-values! search.r-project.org/CRAN/refmans...

Went to a FemTech conference. Watched companies profit from: (1) conflating base rates, (2) letting babies starve, then monitoring the jaundice, and (3) selling at-home testing without statistical literacy. 1. Critique 2. Synthesize ... 4. Profit! wildetruth.substack.com/p/femtech-fails

Oh noed! It hath snowed on my freshly planted windowboxes.

The FemTech Summit today in Berlin was everything a conference should be: – big curtains around panel rooms for hiding – speed-dating rooms w ppl shouting pitches at other ppl who were not the important ppl they wanted to pitch – free coffee, but no decaf (cruel) – free cookie for kid (redemption)

Five-year-old: "They're monster cookies... "This one is in profile."

Finally built a working version of the Rarity Roulette simulator! verawilde.github.io/rarity-roule... It's an app to help visualize estimated hypothetical outcomes of mass screenings for low-prevalence problems. More: wildetruth.substack.com/p/rarity-rou... Would love feedback + feature requests.

New favorite example: LLMs as rare event screeners! github.com/p-e-w/heretic Everyone: "We'll fix alignment with more accuracy!" Math: lol no you won't. Heretic: "Hold my AGPL license." Same problem as mass screenings: structure > vibes.

So I was going to try to code solutions to Frederick Mosteller's *Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions*, (I don't know, when my kids go to college?). But it looks like there is already a hipper version of out there in Project Euler loriculus.org/blog/euler-45/

Chat Control is back! Now buried in telecom regulations. www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-cont... reclaimthenet.org/the-disguise...

Newly released Stockholm Declaration recommends the following reforms to publishing: 1. Academia resumes control of publishing 2. Incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity 3. Independent fraud detection and prevention 4. Legislation and policies to protect science quality and integrity

Psychologists are also definitely guilty of confusing change with treatment response, which is why I wrote about it here: www.the100.ci/2025/01/22/r...

“Landmark study” where openai comes to understand what we’ve been telling them about their own software for three years. (I’m sure many have been saying it for longer.)

Spending some time with family in the Research Triangle area and looking to connect with folks interested in research methods, causal inferences, and AI ethics. Ping if this is you! I'm working on mass screenings for low-prevalence problems, science + statistics reform, uncertainty, and feedbacks.

Rejoice! Papa Bear has been found again. His reappearance spurs me to think harder about endpoints, what really matters -- and how the liberty-security sequential-feedback continuum may extend to medical case studies. But where fore-art thou, adequate data? wildetruth.substack.com/p/bear-is-ba...

but that’s fine. It served a useful function at the time in getting people to think about potential informational value in P-values - it just was too crude an approach, so stimulated development of other methods. Can we have a “z-curve for dummies” explainer to improve take-up?

Arguably the first and most important use of language: getting others to do things. (Conveying factual information, on the other hand: not universally acquired and unstable without training.)

Pediatrician: Does your six month old say "baba"? Me: My baby says "hi," "hey," "Mama," "I go," and ("Are you gonna go get your brother?") "I'm gonna"!

I got a free copy of *The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity* from 80,000 Hours. Glancing at the table of contents, it fails to recognize perspectival limits including bias and error in the evidence on which it's based. But, on p. 6 so far, it's pretty good. Ruin it for me.

So much this. Except I started five blog posts in the midst of a mild autoimmune flare, childcare going away for a while, and grandparents flying in from the States for a summer visit. Now I am not sure which if any of us will survive the next two weeks.

Day 5 with my mother. Please send help. Chocolate, flame-throwers -- every bit helps.

Causal inference iceberg! What's missing?