how is it even possible that outlooks search function is this bad can I please just get emails that contain the matching string in chronological order you’re a trillion dollar company ?

Glad to see Elsevier is investing in important things like suggesting readers that AI reads the articles for them. Nothing screams quality like claiming reading their articles is wasted time

noooooo onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

I think this is kind of neat and I don't think anyone else has noticed it (I've looked and I can't find anyone who has) osf.io/preprints/so... Maybe I should back off "justification" language, but it's at least a remarkable coincidence. I still think someone else *must* have noticed it...

@lakens.bsky.social pointed out on twitter that these text-mining studies (on mostly abstracts) are biased to overestimate the problem because exact test-statistics are more often reported for significant tests while non-significant tests are just described in words.

As an undergraduate I was taught Popper’s criticism of psychoanalysis, summarized as ”psychoanalysis makes no falsifiable predictions”, but in hindsight I think that was more a critique of how Freudians themselves responded to counterexamples. Surely the theories makes (some) predictions?

There’s a fuzzy line between being smart and insider trading and thus it should be made illegal.

I try to not US politics post too much (unless it unless it relates to science) but I find this development very interesting and worrying. I hope these negative polarization doom spirals only happen in two-party systems.

I’ve taken up @wiringthebrain.bsky.social book ”Free Agents: How evolution gave us free will” again and am becoming increasingly convinced Sapolsky (at best) only skimmed the book before their debate.

Admitting that you’re stupid can be like a superpower in a lot of academia tbh. Not stupid as in ”I am incapable of ever understanding” but just don’t pretend you understand out of embarrassment.

It could turn out ”intelligence” is more like doing a specific type of action accurately, and much how a perfectly accurate dart-throwing robot isn’t that much more dangerous than a very accurate dart-throwing robot, ”superintelligence” just doesn’t do that much.

asteriskmag.com/issues/12-bo... Thought this quote summarized the tensions and contradictions around psychiatric diagnoses in an illuminating way. Good nuanced article. I have my own unstructured thoughts on the subject (as do most clinicians, I think).

Some months later I've still not really resolved this tension. If you have a lot of data you get estimates similar to frequentist methods, but beware those estimates have a super duper different meaning in terms of statistical philosophy! #stats #rstats

Knowing that Elon has been trying to fine-tune grok to have a ”conservative”/”anti-woke” bias, I find this genuinely scary. The last time it started calling itself Mecha Hitler etc, but presumably future attempts will be more subtle.

People seem to be discussing multiverse analysis again! I haven’t read the latest piece but will use that as an opportunity to share a blog post of mine with a title of which I’m still proud (although I probably shouldn’t) www.the100.ci/2021/03/07/m...

There’s a lot of bad things to say about mental health/illness discourse online nowadays but personally I still remember it as somehow worse when I was younger. Like I haven’t seen extended debates on ”is everyone actually faking it?” in a long time.

My got o example to generate LLM hallucinations used to be to ask them about somewhat obscure graphic novels, but trying it now I found Claude is able to see if it such information exists in the training data and go into search mode instead. An interesting development imo.

Lots of food for thought in this talk, though in hindsight I realize it was directed at people more expert in causal inference than me. I'm far away from a position to provide resources/commentary/tutorials/templates. On the other hand I feel inspired to try my best to be a positive example.

Stealing crown jewels from The Louvre has great romantic heist energy and joie de vivre, but like what do you do after? who’s the buyer for that sort of stuff?

I consider generating AI images/video/voices of the (recently) dead to be a form of corpse desecration, unless the deceased explicitly asked for it.

I'm taking a course on open science right now, which is very fun and inspiring, but there has been a jarring contrast between the well intentioned intra-academia discussions on how to best improve science during the day and doomscrolling about measles being back during the evening.

I feel like "replicated across cultures" is a bit of an awkward phrase for observational data (for example "those high in neuroticism sleep worse, also in Japan"), but I've seen it a few times. Is there a word as snappy as "replicated" for like "re-observed"?

I generally don’t know what to make of the AI field but I definitely find the technology, especially image and video generation, very surprising. If someone where to describe the technical details beforehand and ask me guess whether it would work I would have said ”no way”.

Notably this problem is also solved 100% without any AI and instead, at zero cost, by journals adopting format-agnostic initial submissions (as many journals have already done)

You know I think you should have the decency to be a bit uncomfortable with the moral conundrums we face in life, that’s all.

We sometimes complain about the lack of ambitious theory building but on the other hand when I come across it I often get a feeling that the authors are moving too fast, not deeply engaging in the nuances of the literature, prematurely leaping ahead.

I think this works as an intuitive explanation for multicolinearity, right? When the cloud is flat the plane is attached in a very stable way. The table has many legs. But when we flatten that cloud with an association between X2 and X2 the table becomes "wobbly" orthogonal to that axis.

spuriouser and spuriouser

So I thought of a visualization on the train for how multicolinearity works (maybe) but now I don’t have any computer access do make it/check it and I have clinical work all day. Pain.

my new rule is that you’re not allowed to be interested in meta-science unless you’re also interested in science sorry.

There’s this one post-rationalist right-winger on twitter that launders the attack on science as legitimate because of the replication crisis and somehow this guy was living rent free in my head for years before I even came across his content.

Really, truly amazing that OpenAI wants us to believe that they are worth a trillion dollars but also they are so desperate for revenue that they created an infinite SlopTok app that opens them up to a billion lawsuits just so that they can maybe someday make it even worse by filling it with ads.

I live! Suck it Icarus!

Had a wonderful time at the #esrii conference in Vilnius! I will now fly in an aeroplane in the sky, much like Icarus, the dead guy, pray for me 🙏

@vilgothuhn.bsky.social presenting the results of our RCT comparing the intolerance of uncertainty model to the metacognitive model for worry as a basis for internet delivered cognitive behavior therapy. #ESRII2025 @isrii.bsky.social

Every online getting company has exactly the data they need to identify people with gambling problems, and the technology and know-how to maximally enable that problem. They also know exactly how to spot the rare skilled gamblers and ban them from playing. Zero economic value. It's basically theft.

Age yourself with a movie you saw in a theatre as a kid

I feel like they didn’t design this game for toddler-dads doing a PhD while working clinically iduno.

Here’s a list of extremely good dream sequences I would miss: -The start of Paprika -Perfect blue, generally -The burning apartment in Shutter Island -Enemy, generally -The short dream in Arrival

Learning that ”the relationship remained significant after adjusting for (unreliable) confounder” is an inference criteria that becomes worse when you have more power has been very formative for how I read the literature.

Waiting for Godot: The Hunt for Godot is the recently announced newest installment of the Godotverse. The long awaited sidequel follows Godot's adventures during the events of the original play.

Nicolas Sarkozy given five-year prison sentence after Libya trial www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

me: maybe i can gain clarity by going over my notes my notes:

I’m not invested in the details of this p-curve debate itself but I found this distinction between ”statistician culture” and ”meta-scientist culture” in this thread illuminating.

There’s a very annoying type of guy who’s against ”social science” in the abstract because he thinks it’s all ideologically biased or worthless drivel, but then the moment he comes across social science he likes this conviction is suddenly nowhere to be seen. See also ”Economics is STEM”

So I've been digitizing hundreds of paper CRFs where study ID is in order of inclusion, but my digitizing is essentially random order, and now I have to strain myself not to waste precious time writing a German Tank Problem function in R and check how close it comes to the real number. Pain.

The smartest guy I personally know used to study by reading difficult material that was way over his head, trying his very best to understand despite it all, and then go backwards to more simple stuff. I've really embraced the first part.

the solution is to use bayesian mcmc methods where you squint at a traceplot until you go "whatever, it's good enough" instead of getting a scary red lettered error message

i think regardless of who has authored a paper, we (the scientific community) can and should stop criticizing the work on lack of perceived novelty. we can do better than perpetuating harmful myths about individual scientific papers having to present a discovery no one has ever thought of before.

On the subject of ”real statistics” vs ”not real statistics” I found @statsepi.bsky.social blogpost ”I am not a real statistician and you can be one too” very inspiring (and reassuring).