Every time I talked to other people with my complaints about behavioral task measures of impulsivity, I heard "Oh yeah, we tried those in our last data collection and we couldn't find anything." I heard it so many times. And the bullshitters convince the rest of us we're doing it wrong somehow.

Here's a suggestion for a New Year's resolution: If you see influential bad research, say something. One part of the whole replication crisis story is that a lot of psychological researchers privately knew that a lot of stuff was bad, but it wasn't discussed publicly.

Yes, and also just look at how good people have got at sport, music and all sorts of things due to a combination of specialism and digital curation - it's very hard to calibrate realistic expectations of one's own performance in such an environment.

Recently finished Nicklas Brendborg's "Super Stimulated." The biggest chunk of the book is about how the food industry has created foods so good we just can't stop eating them. It then also covers sex/porn, drugs, screens (traditional and social media), cosmetics and steroids.>

I underwent NIPT & the results were all fine except they forgot to determine the sex. Now my obgyn's assistant called me to inform me that the company agreed to reanalyse, as long as the obgyn first faxes (!) back (!!) the initial report provided by the company. What a time to be alive!

Just finished Annika Norlin’s “Colony.” It’s a captivating story about a journalist with burn-out who goes into the woods and encounters a strange commune of outsiders. Very fun to learn about all of their backstories and figure out what happened 🧩

Looks like they’re finally running out of tomatoes 🍅

The trend is for countries to eventually adopt universal recommendations for vaccines over time, though some countries do this much faster than others.

Following @nsaphra.bsky.social - will try to do more science posting here as well. Here is a little project I worked on during the Christmas break. Using semantic entropy as a regularizer to calibrate LLM uncertainty: federicov.github.io/uncertainty-...

Denmark's vaccinations vs the United States's: Most of their vaccines eventually became universal recommendations, though much more slowly than in the US.

I'd say at this point they're trolling, although tbf the selection is already better than yesterday.

I saw this chart in the wild a few days ago and it's been on my mind because the longer I look at it, the more confused I become by it. 📊 I'm fairly sure it's AI generated for a few reasons... A #DataViz thread 🧵

My husband discovered my post about drone motors in hair dryes and created this meme.

How likely is ‘likely’? Does ‘likely’ have a higher probability than ‘probable’? I put together a quick quiz so you can see how you interpret probability phrases, then see how you compare with others: probability.kucharski.io

Here's a question for the causal inference people: What is your take on causality without counterfactuals and/or causal inference without counterfactuals?

Mensa Leipzig 2026 off to a good start, successfully identifying all variations of tomato sauce that I wouldn't want to eat, despite actually liking tomato sauce.

Okay but are you allowed to lift them up. Just to check…!

There are actually many more things you can point to as examples of recent scientific breakthroughs www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br... than 'curing Alzheimer's in mice', which people have been claiming to have done for decades and has a tenuous connection to what happens in humans.

Nothing comes out of these water jets but lies and insinuations. Why did I buy a j'accuzzi?

TIL the Nazis tried to establish their own version of Silent Night (see alt text for translation). de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stille_...

Screw this I’m caving in I’m making the Parmesan shortbread

For under 10s, every piece is a statement piece

In related news, I just received an e-mail that said “Julia, you’re going to love these looks” and then it was all pants with elastic waists.

My daughter’s friend wore an excellent sweater to the zoo and I thought “that one would look great on me.” Then I found out they’re selling it for adults as well!!! Can’t wait to turn daycare pick up into “Who wore it better?”

What a time to be alive! "22 women became the first to receive mitochondrial donation to replace the mitochondrial DNA in their eggs, and have had 8 live births so far. They carried mutations that could have otherwise caused potentially fatal inherited metabolic diseases in their children"

Mogelpackung: Die meisten dieser „Natur-Experimente“ sind reine Beobachtungsstudien 😤

The soft serve is perfect, 10/10, without any questions.

‪It has a name now 😜 Many thanks to Ken for agreeing to put his good name to my...artwork. The image is in the public domain (CC 0), but citations to the linked documents are warmly welcomed. ✅ zenodo.org/records/1808... ✅ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24452418/

My ob-gyn has a display case with various types of medication and I just realized that one fairly generic looking box just says PLACEBO 🤨

My dad gifted me a new hair dryer for Christmas and all I can say is that those drone engineers mean business 🌬️

Falls noch jemand Substantive braucht 😂

Yes…ha ha ha…YES

I’ve been thinking about making a public lab notebook. Idea is a sort of working (but publicly saved) preregistration for active projects Is anyone doing something like this? And recommendations for where to host it?

I used to live very close to a Costco. One time I was buying two handles of tequila and nothing else (there was a buy two, get $10 off promo). The woman behind me in line looked at my cart and said “well there’s a romantic dinner for two.”

Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth. www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

Merry frivolous kitchen appliances season to those who celebrate. I am now proud owner of a soft serve/froyo/slushie machine.

I finally got some time to flesh out my rant about these headlines... TL;DR: age differences ≠ aging jenndowd.substack.com/p/does-adole... #demography #episky #medsky #neurosky

The children provided further offerings to mollify the pagan spirits.

I started listening to this and already have learned more about livers than I ever knew before.

Life goals: getting banned by NPR by having too many opinions

So, randomization is not a *sufficient* condition for good research. Far from it. The best experimental social science being done is that work where either the theory or the operationalization (or both) are the emphasis. Randomization is "easy" - the challenge is what you randomize and why.

never stop believing in your dreams

never stop believing in your dreams

I can’t remember where I heard this (maybe somewhere obvious) but I tell students the product of the masters is not their thesis, it’s them and their abilities.

only tangentially related - I wanted to do a systematic scoping review for my msc thesis because the field seemed too much of a mess to just do an experiment and was told that everyone is doing literature review, you need to have an empirical chapter too..

Some days ago a student struggling with her master’s thesis e-mailed me, asking me about partial least squares structural equation modeling. I told her I can only tell her not to do that, and then she sent more details.>