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

Policy #evaluation inherits concepts from multiple disciplines, and somewhere along the way many of them have become muddled. This blog post sketches what I think are seven of the most irritating myths. andifugard.info/seven-persis...

He made beer that’s also a vaccine. Now controversy is brewing: shared just as an interesting story. www.sciencenews.org/article/vacc...

Love this short opinion piece on “mechanical bypass” in analogy to “spiritual bypass”.

H0 H0 H0 😂

So much of complicated statistics (latent class/profile stuff, SEM, network analysis) seems optimized for publishing in ‘top’ journals without meaningfully improving knowledge.

Doug Altman was an internationally renowned statistician who served as The BMJ’s chief statistical adviser. Read about life and work that made this statistician a "citation millionaire" #BMJChristmas www.bmj.com/content/391/...

Perfect read for the end of the year. LLMs reveal what is wrong with how we evaluate science through citation metrics.

We’re excited to announce the winners of the 2025 Pudding Cup! Our entry pool was the strongest ever with close to 100 submissions. Show our 3 winners some love 🫶 on this thread, and check out the full details and honorable mentions at the link: pudding.cool/pudding-cup/

Psychologists, what are your favorite (open) data sets for teaching multilevel modelling? I have a lot of observational examples, would love a therapy RCT with varying effects for therapists or some such.

Seven-parameter drift-diffusion pdfs and cdfs now in Stan statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/11/s...

Hey #rstats and #stats people, does anyone know of any references that explain the hazards of trying to run or interpret models with all combinations of many predictors? (i.e., including multiple 2-way and 3-way interactions)

Is WM a gateway to LTM? In this registered report we find that higher WM load rarely impairs LTM encoding - suggesting WM capacity is not a bottleneck for forming LTM traces. @as-souza.bsky.social @edamizrak.bsky.social @cognition-zurich.bsky.social psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... [1/3]

Do you have an open working memory dataset and want it to be findable and reused? You can now add it to the Open WM Data Hub: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData! The collection of datasets tagged with useful metadata is steadily growing thanks to a small team of volunteers!

New paper in Psych Review on a model of false recognition in Deese-Roediger-McDermott DRM task. Not just recognition responses, but also associated RTs! And not just the semantic task, but also the structural task - where words overlap in orthography/phonology! A thread!

"Replication rates are higher than experts predicted and p-hacking is much less common than we expected!" replications.clearerthinking.org/three-surpri...

Next Wednesday Dec 10th, we are excited to have Dr @danieljamesyon.bsky.social join us for our last session of the year. Dr Yon will tell us about how our interactions with others alter metacognitive states of mind. Full details on our website (surl.li/mqtofs). All are welcome in person!

I am hiring a postdoc for a DFF-funded project on social influence, and the decision processes that fuel rich-get-richer dynamics in the online/offline world. The position is for up to a year, competitive Danish salary, remote work possible. Interested or know somebody? DM me or share!

Finally got around to switching my in-browser #rstats R Primers website to use the newer better-supported #QuartoPub Live extension, which will now let me eventually add nicer inline feedback someday - Free primers site: r-primers.andrewheiss.com - Extension: r-wasm.github.io/quarto-live/

Next Wednesday Dec 3rd we are happy to host Prof. @miroslavsirota.bsky.social to tell us how utility-based signal detection theory can inform us of the cognitive mechanisms for (over)use of antiobiotics. Full details on our website (surl.li/mqtofs). All welcome, in person with Prof. Sirota!

#rstats It is with profound sadness I heard that my long-time friend and colleague, John Fox passed away this week. He was the author of {car}, {effects}, {Rcmdr}, ... and numerous influential books. I will miss him greatly. www.john-fox.ca

Time effects on working memory and long-term memory, are they similar or different? Our work with Alessandra Souza and Klaus Oberauer here.

A colleague is looking for an open-source/online (pref. peer-reviewed) reference for properties of probability distributions. Any ideas? (NIST gives *very* basic properties e.g. www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handb... but I think they're looking for something more complete ...)

UCL staff feel ‘betrayed’ over professional services shake-up www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ucl-sta...

Tfw you're reading about Maurice Hilleman, who developed 40 vaccines in his lifetime, and his work ethic

Science in 2025

Belated but hopefully still exciting #rstats news: bridgesampling version 1.2-1 has just arrived on CRAN: cran.r-project.org/package=brid... We now finally provide cmdstanr support (!) plus Monte Carlo Standard Error (MCSE), both thx to Giorgio Micaletto and @avehtari.bsky.social!

Papermillers complain about PubPeer. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Our new paper on how free time improves working memory and long-term memory differently at JEP:General with Klaus Oberauer and Alessandra Souza: Our results challenge a single explanation of the free-time benefit for memory retention across short and long intervals. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

A few thoughts on alcohol duty ahead of the budget (and an excuse to update some old graphs). These two show the important of accounting for inflation - in cash terms alcohol duty rates are higher than ever before, but in real terms they are at historically low levels.

The Department of Statistics at Warwick is holding an MSc Online Open Day for prospective master’s students on Monday, 24th November, at 10am (UK time). Find more information and register here: warwick.ac.uk/fac/sc...

We hope everyone is having a great reading week! We will be back next Wednesday Nov 12th with Dr Jon Rozeenbeek from University of Cambridge, talking about avoiding the online "bad bot" apocalypse. Full details on our website (surl.li/mqtofs). Join us in person at IoE (UCL)!

Short thread on today's HotFresh SJDM paper: bsky.app/profile/maxm...

Really cool new work from @mmrobinson93.bsky.social

New on Pinkerite: Steven Pinker: still undefeated as the world's biggest weasel www.pinkerite.com/2025/10/stev...

Charles Murray longs for the days when you could brag to the NYTimes about how much you enjoyed using Thai prostitutes. www.pinkerite.com/2025/05/one-...

You actually can turn off the annoying generative AI popups in Acrobat Reader!

Accurate. #academia #academy #philsky #philosophysky #philosophy #science

New preprint with @rogierk.bsky.social @paulbuerkner.com - we introduce "relative measurement uncertainty" - a reliability estimation method that's applicable across a broad class of Bayesian measurement models (e.g., generative-, computational- and item response theory-models osf.io/h54k8

Great post by @andrew.heiss.phd on animating #rstats {dplyr} operations www.andrewheiss.com/blog/2024/04...

I remember reading a blog post somewhat recently on here arguing that for open science practices every effort counts. So we should not expect every paper to fulfil all open science criteria immediately but researcher should start by making their data open, then their code, etc. Anyone has a link?

🚨 The Economist has been telling you for years that polygamy causes civil war by locking men out of marriage. A new article with @rebeccasear.bsky.social and @anthrolog.bsky.social explains that the demography of marriage markets doesn't actually work that way. 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Still a bit stunned but delighted to receive this from @royalsociety.org

New paper from @uclpals.bsky.social PhD student Calvin Deans-Browne and myself. We study to what degree prior beliefs and argument quality affect evaluations of arguments about political topics (e.g., abortion). Our results show prior beliefs play a larger role than argument quality itself. A 🧵

NEW FULLY FUNDED PHD POSITION Looking for a motivated PhD candidate to join our team. Together with Danya Muilwijk, Jeffrey Beekman and I, you will explore opportunities and limitations of AI in the context of organoids For more info and for applying 👉 www.careersatumcutrecht.com/vacancies/sc...

FWIW, both Clint and I discussed some points in the paper w/Uri (can't tag him b/c he blocked me) in private some time ago. To be clear, neither we nor he is entitled to "first comment" on anything. But if you say you have a policy you're willing to ignore when you feel, you don't have that policy.>

I am pleased to share that "the bird study" is now accepted at Psychology and Aging! A great collaboration with visiting intern Kishen Senziani, @leabartsch.bsky.social & @edamizrak.bsky.social 😀 Check out the pre-print below and a short thread on the study design and main takeaways 🧵👇

Two new preprints on multilevel HMMs! Time series data is now pervasive in psychology and new methods are needed to model the dynamics in such data. Hidden Markov Models (HHMs) are powerful models for dynamics in which a system is switching between a number of discrete states.

Against my better instincts, I have written some notes on how human probability judgements work and what you should expect from surveys that ask people to guess what proportion of the population is transgender. I hope never to speak of this matter again