Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

This is Jessica.

Brett Reynolds writes: I liked the two-column move in your Orwell post.

So much good stuff here at the Edge Foundation and Jeffrey Epstein webpage: – The connection to Ted talks.

I just read the Pew Research Center’s new report “No Easy Fix for Bogus Respondents in Online Opt-In Polls”.

Gustavo pointed us to this project (see also here) by David Dorer to impute data to lower census levels (block/tract) from PUMAs (public use microdata areas, as defined by the U.S.

We’re usually posting on a one-year delay, but I bumped this one up because this private invitation is “unique to you, not forwardable, and expires in seven days.”

From last year’s post, What’s your Jordan3 number?

From the NYT: Mayor Zohran Mamdani is expected to propose linking Grand Army Plaza with Prospect Park by closing a dangerous stretch of road between them. . . .

We had a discussion last year: I got this email the other day from a journalist at a major news organization: I’m a science reporter from **, wondering if you’d have some time to talk/reflect on the Trump administration’s embrace and use of concepts like…

Last year we briefly discussed a hard-to-follow paper by political scientist Walter Mebane discussing possible “malevolent distortions of electors’ intentions.”

So, yeah, I’ve been reading more of these Updike stories.

So, those exciting results I presented at StanCon about Walnutpie?

This is Witold and today we are building a bear.

I came across this opinion piece, “Postdocs Aren’t Burger Flippers: Why Unionization Is a Bad Idea,” by Yale medical school professor Evan Morris, who writes: Unfortunately, in 2026, postdoc unions are proliferating.

We’ve been discussing how to use population margin information about poststratification variables (see Modeling Complex Contingency Tables and SynthMargins & Bayes-Raking).

John Updike wrote around 250 short stories, the vast majority of which are from the perspective of the “Updike” character.

Dan Ariely—the much-decorated business school professor, retired Wall Street Journal columnist, Ted-talk star, NPR hero, Jeffrey Epstein contact, Founding Partner of Irrational Capital, insurance agent, inspiration for a hit TV sitcom, and author of the i…

There’s some literature on saltatory growth in children.

First, let’s get this one out of the way: my take on The Odyssey movie.

A student asks the above question.

This is Jessica.

A few years ago we discussed Objects of the class Jacques Cousteau: people who are world famous (or at least world famous in the U.S.) but of a category for which there’s only one famous person.

I was going through comments on this morning’s post which involved the amazing productivity evidenced by the list of preprints here: But then when I was checking something, I saw that something happened: The number of papers dropped from 259 to 99!

Jeremy Horpedahl tells the story: Nicholas Polson has, by my count using his SSRN page, already written 258 working papers in 2026 alone.

This job ad is by Aki I’m looking for postdocs and doctoral students to work on Bayesian workflow.

Luke Ford writes: [Regarding] the replication crisis, researcher degrees of freedom, and the gap between what statistical methods claim to establish and what they can actually support . . .

Last week we discussed SynthMargins, a method from the poster Modeling Complex Contingency Tables that uses partial information (margins) about poststratification variables.

Our wonderful new Bayesian Workflow book is now available as a free pdf!

Related to our recent post on the absurdity of open access fees, somebody recently informed me that a group of statisticians that work in sports decided they were sick and tired of this with the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports and launched a new

My new posts here have a one-year waiting list, but I’m bumping this one up because it’s important.

Just send me your goddamn prompt.

Wendy Moore, in a review of a book by Oliver Basciano, writes: Leprosy is caused by a bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, first identified by a Norwegian doctor, Gerhard Armauer Hansen, in 1873 . . .

A frequent commenter pointed me to this paper, “Sport and longevity: an observational study of international athletes.”

StanCon 2026 just happened!

It would be great to have 35% more citations and over 5 times as many downloads, but I’d rather have 2,740 Jamaican beef patties.

Sol Hsiang writes: We have a comment coming out in Nature next week that is going to cause the retraction of a high-profile paper by Kotz et al. from last year (the second most cited climate paper in the news in 2024).

This post is by Lizzie.

Sanjeev Sripathi writes: I came across a firm that seems to be offering a miracle product – https://letsmoderate.com/products/sugar-slayer .

Anjali Thomas writes: I am writing to share a paper which is a re-examination of my 2018 AJPS article entitled “Targeting Ordinary Voters or Political Elites” which was previously discussed on this blog here.

Andrew looped me into an email thread with folks working on poststratification with partial population information.

As with baseball, football, and basketball (and I’m sure other sports too), the standard of political analytics is just so much higher than it was, decades ago.

Regular blog readers will remember Golden Krust, source of our standard unit of currency.

Beyond the teaching question, this is an interesting topic on its own: thinking about classical statistical ideas of point estimation, hypothesis testing, and uncertainty quantification, but taking Bayesian methods as a starting point.

The above is the title of a recent a newspaper op-ed (pdf here) by columnist David French.

With some sustained effort, I cleaned out my entire inbox!

In a distressing update to an already distressing story, James Smoliga writes: Q-collar is ramping up its fall sports campaign.

This came in the mail: My name is ** and I am a junior at ** High School.

Mitzi Morris sends along the paper trail (I love archaic idioms) for her data spelunking in advance of her all-day introductory Stan tutorial next week at StanCon (we’ll see you in Uppsala).

The Q collar, I hope you don’t remember, is a neck accessory that is advertised as “proven” to protect athletes’ brains, but the studies purporting to offer this proof are suspect.

OK, this one’s time constrained so I’ll post it right away, not on the usual lag.