No. I don't teach at the moment. Search committees are free to slide into my DMs, though

As is always correct and in accordance with all the laws of the internet, I just watched Tom Holland's epic Lip Sync Battle performance, and now I am sharing it with all of you so you can do the same.

This is related to a private conversation I had recently. IMO, if you want to use Bayesian statistics in your professional work, either (a) work through at least one Bayesian textbook yourself or (b) collaborate with someone who has already done that work themselves. Take your data seriously.

Do you teach #rstats? Do your students complain about how lame and old-fashioned dplyr is? Don't worry: I have the solution for you: github.com/hadley/genzp.... genzplyr is dplyr, but bussin fr fr no cap.

once again seeking others' opinions to guide my life choices: of those who dropped out of a PhD or converted to Masters, did anyone subsequently complete a PhD with a different topic and supervisors? thoughts for or against this path?

New post, on the time Einstein had his first run in with the US peer review system: kucharski.substack.com/p/einstein-v...

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

This is an excellent point that generalizes. Researchers often defend suboptimal practices by referring to future studies with better designs. But: Why would anybody run those studies when you can just throw a bunch of variables into a regression and make sweeping "preliminary" claims?

My own TLDR for the message from this paper: statsepi.substack.com/p/sorry-what...

We wrote an article explaining why you shouldn't put several variables into a regression model and report which are statistically significant - even as exploratory research. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/.... How did we do?

This is excellent, and I'm so glad this paper was finally written, and so clearly as well. I basically write an equivalent every time I am consulting with someone proposing this type of study, and I'm so glad I can save my effort and just send them this instead!

My journey in anaesthesia research @bjajournals.bsky.social @thermh.bsky.social @anzca.bsky.social @anzcactn.bsky.social @unimelb.bsky.social topmedtalk.libsyn.com/perioperativ...

after some cool theoretical background, I think these slides sum up Thomas Lumley's talk well especially "resist mathematical defaults", "rank tests have stronger assumptions than the t-test" & "ordinal data is not the easy option" a very different take from Frank Harrell's writing on the subject!

"Pavlovian causal inference": the inherent human tendency to infer causation from mere association, even when we know we ought not to.

Some days I get a treat on my walk in to teach…

Key point from my invasive CO talk the other day #CHEST2025

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?...

Does anyone know a workaround for modeling residual correlations in multivariate models in {brms}? It only works for Gaussian and Student distributions right now, but maybe someone has a hack… #RStats (Maybe @solomonkurz.bsky.social?)

People sometimes ask why we want to rate DAGs. Couldn't we just rate statistical models instead? We like to explain it with capybaras and bicycles.

Hello Bluesky! We rate DAGs. Some are great. Some are... not so great. But we rate them all. Let's start with a famous powerpoint hairball a.k.a. "the Afghanisdag", presented to Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal around 2010. His own rating? 1/10 "When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war"

I read and write, I explore and I question, I design and script and analyse, I interpret and communicate. I do this to train my mind in the hopes of one day generating new knowledge. New knowledge that might even be useful, and that no algorithm can yet be trained on.

I feel I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for the judicious use of a small syringe of saline with a red sticker, rather than a full on rant when the surgeon asks for muscle relaxation just before the end of the case.

yep 😞

I clearly had a lot of thoughts/feelings from reading Terry's blog post, so I wrote one of my own It ended up being a bit of a stream-of-thought post but I think it captures some of my worries benharrap.com/post/2025-10... #statssky #episky #academicsky

Just because an LLM can produce a report with various figures & charts doesn't mean it is good at statistics. Because good statistics is not about producing code. It's about deep knowledge of study design & conduct. In my opinion, 95% of all data science problems come from poor questions & design.

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.)

We have created a resource in the ISBA website where you can find all recorded webinars: bayesian.org/ba-webinars/ Also, don't forget about the ISBA YouTube channel featuring curated playlists from ISBA World Meetings and specialized workshops and seminars: www.youtube.com/@isba-intern...

I can't be the only one, right? #statsmeme

We've all been there... 🫂

I don’t want kids “pushing to main”. What are they pushing? It could be drugs.

Hadn’t heard this before either. Interesting!

Well. I get exasperated about this. The problem is that many expect statistics to be easy. Some then get annoyed when it isn’t. Mathematics gets a free pass it seems. I am still learning statistics after more than 50 years.

I just want you guys to know that if your #rstats models aren't converging, it's likely because you're taking Tylenol. Tylenol can flatten likelihood surfaces due to multidimensional recontainerization of typhoid surfaces. I'm going to ask the FDA to modify the label of Tylenol to indicate this.

#statsmeme 🧵inspired by @dingdingpeng.the100.ci and @vincentab.bsky.social's awesome paper:

Whoa—my book is up for pre-order! 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥 𝐭𝐨 𝐌𝐞𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐨 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐭 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐭 & 𝐌𝐋 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐢𝐧 #Rstats 𝐚𝐧𝐝 #PyData The book presents an ultra-simple and powerful workflow to make sense of ± any model you fit The web version will stay free forever and my proceeds go to charity. tinyurl.com/4fk56fc8

I knew that there has been incredible progress for diabetics, but I hadn’t been quite aware of the central role that insulin played in kicking off biotechnology as a field ✨

Idea for a question on the final exam: <Screenshot of a #stats dunk from Bluesky> Explain this dunk. Why is the quoted person wrong? What is the point made in this post? What would you do differently?

I'm inclined to agree. I haven't implemented an MCMC sampler but I've implemented the MICE algorithm (also a Gibbs sampler) from scratch and that was illuminating

The new {marginaleffects} release for #RStats (0.30.0) comes with two new vignettes: 1. Speed up computation with automatic differentiation (often 10x gains) marginaleffects.com/bonus/perfor... 2. Power analyses with {marginaleffects} and {DeclareDesign}. marginaleffects.com/bonus/power....

NEW PAPER! (in press in EPIDEMIOLOGY) Have you wondered: - How to specify a target trial: as an ideal trial or something else? - What biases do target trial emulations and actual RCTs share? - How does it all relate to potential outcomes? Read here! 👉 arxiv.org/abs/2405.10026 #EpiSky #CausalSky

lol my new favorite in-class example for Causality and DAGs day lecture just dropped 😆 #AcademicChatter #statistics

Our practice of anaesthesia has been empirically derived over the last two centuries. We have yet to identify the neurophysiological basis of anaesthesia because we have yet to identify the neurophysiological basis of consciousness. So what we do is fundamentally a sophisticated guess.

The only answer we have at present is provide more anaesthetic