If you're attending @ncme38.bsky.social this week, stop by the "Majestic" room on Thursday @ 1:45p to hear about our majestic new project on "Corroborative factor analysis."

If I had any students to advise, I'd start a reading club where we'd talk about the composition of creative prose. I'd have them dissect Nicholson Baker's novella about riding an escalator to buy shoelaces & they'd probably hate it but at least learn that boring topics don't require boring writing

One of the simplest ways

how lucky I am to have fifty incredible years of posting ahead of me

That which can be depicted with a simple photograph need not be generated with a complex prompt

Now out: How did earthquakes come to have a (quantitative) size? How can we quantify without experimental control? @cristianlarph.bsky.social and I answer both questions and show their implications for human science measurement. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #philsci #histsci #seismology

Believe in your work. Stop ending papers with “More research is needed” and start concluding with “No more research on this topic is needed.”

I know I’m a good reviewer because authors always thank me for my helpful comments.

Costco Connection magazine just published a full article about why and how to stop your car

Interesting story about legendary Bayesian Sir Harold Jeffreys refusing to update his prior

where do you think the term occam’s razor comes from? i suspect it originates from the Oceanic Coastal and Continental Alliiance of Magistrates (OCCAM), an ancient global court system that was founded in what we understand to be the 14th century, but what they know to be the 32nd. they were feared t

I enjoyed the Super Bowl halftime show but it would be nice if next year the halftime show was a plain black screen for fifteen minutes, giving football fans a quiet moment to contemplate their own mortality

Only British Vogue has the courage to publish true science as it was practiced in the 18th century Transactions of the Royal Society

I love to read about a big number freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/20...

Due date for proposals was Feb 1, but if you submit a proposal by Feb 15, we will add it to the stack. Please share this announcement!

Exercise your prerogative as teacher

Scientists should invent a Good Day clock that counts down to everything being fine

Looking through Norbert Wiener's 1950 book "The Human Use of Human Beings," just now, this 2-paragraph passage jumped out at me from the first chapter. Extremely relevant to our troubling times.

Researchers often treat ordinal variables as continuous. What if we could mimic this in an ordinal factor analysis/IRT model? We propose new identification constraints so that the latent variable goes from 1 to (# of ordered categories), with connections to treating ordinal variables as continuous.

Excited to share a new call for papers for a special issue in Psychometrika focused on Data Intensive Methods in Psychometrics that I'll be guest editing with @kyliegorney.bsky.social, @jmbh.bsky.social, @leonievogelsmeier.bsky.social, and Ben Domingue: www.psychometricsociety.org/post/call-sp...

Enroll in my new workshop to realize your dream of learning IRT #quantpsych #psychometrics #psychsky #statssky

Consider submitting a proposal to the (open access) Psychometrika special issue on Variable Selection for Complex Psychometric Data, with a proposal deadline of Jan 15. Full details:

My first read of 2026 will be this biography of Willard Gibbs by poet Muriel Rukeyser (published by @mariapopova.bsky.social)

Asking for a friend

Reupping the call below + sharing that @winterstat.bsky.social and I will be presenting our work on model evaluation & fitting propensity analysis at the upcoming Pacific Quant Psych Conference (Jun 29-30; UC Davis) organized by @mijke.bsky.social and Ben Domingue. Request for proposals coming soon!

here’s a free version: neat_research_panel <- data.frame( id = 1:100, treatment = sample(c(TRUE, FALSE), 100, replace = TRUE), outcome = rnorm(100, mean = 50, sd = 5) )

Gonna be rejecting any paper that draws any inference about people from this approach.

Yellow-Red-Blue, by Wassily Kandinsky, 1925 (detail, rotated), 📸 by @riogiancarlo.bsky.social

A perspectivist framework for understanding statistical assumptions: "The description of the world underlying statistical models has to be understood from the perspective that is sketched by the statistical assumptions." By @kinozhao.bsky.social hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/qasl4fza #PhilSci

While teaching a course on Item Response Theory this semester, I created a Shiny app for visualizing some polytomous item response models: falkcarl.shinyapps.io/polytomous/ This is an initial draft, so comments/questions/suggestions are welcome! #Psychometrics #RShiny #IRT

New ship of Theseus just dropped, but now it has conscious thought

I feel like psychometrics education tends to be too focused on ”mathy” stuff (e.g. factor analysis) and too light on psychological stuff (e.g. thinking seriously about what’s happening when someone answers a questionnaire).

Working on a solo-authored adversarial collaboration

Taps sign

One of my beliefs is that during a holiday week email shouldn't work at all for anyone

When I ask people to pronounce Likert

Announcement: I am excited to be co-editing (with Li Cai) an upcoming Special Issue of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology on "Advances in Statistical Model Evaluation." Proposals due Feb 1. Details: www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu... Please repost! #quantpsych #mathpsych #philsci #statsky

Guys named Wes love a chaotic and incoherent approach www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

“you have what it takes to make it to the top” cannot be read as anything but a brutal attack on one’s character

Oh you can see the “aurora borealis”? How impressive. I’m reading my 20th article of the day on the same subject, and I’m learning very little

Lakatos: “In a progressive research programme, theory leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts.” #philsci

Me, trying to get my parents to sign up for home internet in 1996

My work is going to dominate this game once we get to the lower right corner

Saved you a click: it's performing the charade of life in a spiritual wasteland

How do I pin someone else’s tweet

I do not need this distraction in my life. But I just wrote code for Steve Reich's "Piano Phase" if anyone wants to zone out: note("[<e4 b4 d5> <f#4 c#5>]*5,[<e4 b4 d5> <f#4 c#5>]*5.05") .sound("piano")