The hype around LLMs seems to be "yes the outputs aren't good and the costs and harms outweigh the benefits, but imagine if this or a different technology was actually useful"

New preprint 🥳 The city of Leipzig conducts large-scale surveys of adolescents. In 2023, the gender gap in life satisfaction has significantly widened, with girls declining more steeply than boys. What's up with that?> (work with @rmcelreath.bsky.social and @gregork.bsky.social)

Back on social media for a day and I already feel inadequate.

Journals - I'm totally up for doing peer reviews - sometimes I enjoy it! But it really is up to you whether you publish something

If you are not sure if method A or B is better, "sensitivity analysis" is probably not going to help you ...

I'm so tired of reading AI slop in essays / grants / articles etc ... I don't really have anything against AI aside from the pointless destruction of the planet ... it's just SO DULL

When reading authors' responses to your peer reviews, does anyone appreciate "we thank the reviewer for this valuable comment"?

Analyses of open health datasets can offer valuable contributions to health & medicine, but recent years have seen a proliferation of papers lacking robust or novel findings. In this Editorial, we provide guidance for conducting & reporting high-quality analyses using open datasets🧪 plos.io/4poBmZo

I love journals with retro titles

Adolescent mental health prediction models in the 1960s: At age 5-6 these researchers believed you could determine if a child would become delinquent based five factors in the environment of the child. www.nytimes.com/1965/01/31/a...

?untidy (after loading emmeans) "Dare to be un-tidy! ... Statistical analysis is not just a workflow; it is a discipline" #rstats

The Goldilocks research methods - www.the100.ci/2020/07/31/o... - from @dingdingpeng.the100.ci

Also, good studies addressing the same important research question as previous studies are deemed lower impact than studies addressing brand new poor research questions

I love this ... but @elsevierconnect.bsky.social why do you say the "peer review process is deemed to have been compromised", rather than the editing / publishing process? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Moral: Be careful what you ask for.

So absolutely pumped when I do a peer review and the publisher offers me a 25% discount on books for a limited duration and maximum total value

At what point in your career do people stop telling you that your definition of a p-value is wrong?

Really enjoyed this clear and concise presentation of the problem with studies that throw 10 different covariates into a multiple regression and interpret them causally. So obvious in hindsight that this is problematic, but I have definetly been guilty of this. bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/...

Sunk costs and spite are basically the vodka red bull of the examined life

An LLM-controlled robot experiences a mental breakdown during a test to pass the butter from the kitchen. arxiv.org/abs/2510.21860 Some snapshots of its inner monologue from Appendix D:

📝 New Research Methods & Reporting article: Covariate adjustment in cluster randomised trials 📝 A practical guide for when and how to adjust for covariates. Read more ⬇️ www.bmj.com/content/391/...

Idea for a Christmas BMJ paper: submit loads of Christmas BMJ papers, then do a survival analysis of time to rejection. Then submit the survival analysis as a Christmas BMJ paper the following year

Also, sometimes people just either don't care, or more commonly are so in love with a hypothesis that they ignore other possibilities. Personally I don't think methods resolve this, it just needs hard case by case work. academic.oup.com/ije/article/...

It's possible to prove that under certain conditions, shrinkage plus data perturbation will lead to asymptotically zero false positive rate - but, it makes interpretation of the regression coefficients even harder.

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?

Sports stats

A really good talk on the stepped wedge design! Including some fascinating history of the first ever stepped wedge trial

Are cloud based data analysis platforms a massive practical joke

Annual PSA: if the interaction term in your regression model is significant, this suggests a deviation from additive or multiplicative effects depending on if you choose an additive or multiplicative model. Interactions can actually reverse depending on this decision!

When a corporate department gives you a template to complete, why is it always in Word 97-2003 format with floating text boxes and tiny margins

There are parallels with the "industry playbook" of citing insufficient evidence to support public health interventions

Thank you!!

The more I use R, the more I realise they did a pretty good job of deciding what you probably need in the basic package #RStats

Top tip for journal editors and funding bodies who review evaluations of public health interventions: rather than send it to peer reviewers, just ask "did you realise your intervention is clustered?"

Genuinely odd comparison!

jumpscare on instagram @dandekadt.bsky.social

If you never set par(xpd = NA) when making plots in R, you haven't lived

'He might be telling those people to go home. As our country's health and social care secretary, I want to say directly to those people... they are home' Wes Streeting criticises Reform's plans to deport people from the UK if they fail to meet stricter rules👏

"While many people would demand a significant amount of money to stop using Instagram and Tik Tok, they would also be willing to pay to eliminate Instagram and Tik Tok from their community ... people often spend time or money on goods whose existence they deplore." papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

What are the trajectories of a thing? And following that, what factors are associated with those trajectories: a multinomial regression analysis with stepwise variable selection and null hypothesis tests that you didn't know exist

When research papers start out with "little is known about X", you must wonder if people actually need to know about X

My most dreaded situation: being in a small group discussion at a workshop and being nominated to feed back to the whole group

Seeing students getting lost with methods and chatGPT. It's the first point of call, rather than textbooks or foundational methods articles. chatGPT is taking them off on the wrong path and they don't realise it's not always a great source, or consider reading original sources to be labour intensive

Anyone here into unlocking potential or harnessing the power of stuff?

Prof John Wright, Director of Born in Bradford @bihr.bsky.social, giving us a warm welcome to Bradford

Personally I just can't get on board with anything that is not a panacea. What's the point? ❌Small effect sizes ❌ Anything multifaceted ❌The Rose Hypothesis ❌"Partial" achievement of learning outcomes in your educational portfolio ❌Results that might be useful as part of a meta analysis No thanks!

The madly insane efforts of reviewers to reject my research are somehow indications of its power

If it's not a panacea, I'm not interested

Let's stop studying things that are not silver bullets. Silver bullets seem much more effective and I think we should focus on those