Blog · corpus.blog/blogs/statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/posts
Andrew Gelman
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
2025
1 Jul 2025
It’s Sapolsky time: About that bogus claim that “chess grandmasters” burn 6000 calories per dayoriginal ↗
30 Jun 2025
29 Jun 2025
A bright shiny object: Misapplication of Benford’s law published in health economics journaloriginal ↗
28 Jun 2025
27 Jun 2025
Bring on the Stupid: When does it make sense to judge a person, a group, or an organization by its worst?original ↗
26 Jun 2025
26 Jun 2025
24 Jun 2025
The 2024 baby name statistics are available, and Laura Wattenberg and Philip Cohen have some thoughtsoriginal ↗
23 Jun 2025
“Deciphering the Neighborhood Atlas Area Deprivation Index: The Consequences of Not Standardizing”original ↗
21 Jun 2025
NIH plan to remove ideological influence from science. How does this fit in the junk science being promoted by the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services?original ↗
20 Jun 2025
19 Jun 2025
“Political Prediction and the Wisdom of Crowds”: Evaluating an election forecast over time by comparing to betting odds over timeoriginal ↗
17 Jun 2025
14 Jun 2025
13 Jun 2025
Better and worse ways to mix human and LLM responses in behavioral research (but you still have to figure what you’re measuring)original ↗
12 Jun 2025
“Scientific poetic license?” What do you call it when someone is lying but they’re doing it in such a socially-acceptable way that nobody ever calls them on it?original ↗
11 Jun 2025
9 Jun 2025
8 Jun 2025
7 Jun 2025
6 Jun 2025
Anything you can do with Bayesian inference you can do in other ways. Bayesian inference is a bit like calculus: You can do derivatives and integrals without calculus (indeed, mathematicians in pre-Newtonian times were able to compute limits, with care), but calculus makes it a lot easier. Similarly, I find that Bayesian inference makes it a lot easier to combine information.original ↗
5 Jun 2025
3 Jun 2025
Pascal’s triangle, the Ramanujan principle, and what makes something look like a part of an ellipse or a part a parabola?original ↗
2 Jun 2025
Names in fiction (Perkus Tooth, Morrison Roog, Ragle Gumm, Addison Doug, Bodie Kane, and Thalia Keith)original ↗
1 Jun 2025
Statistical graphics: When does it make sense to introduce deliberate distortion to counteract an expected perceptual illusion?original ↗
30 May 2025
Russian roulette: You can have a deterministic potential-outcome framework, or an asymmetric utility function, but not bothoriginal ↗
29 May 2025
Jerzy Neyman, Sigmund Freud, and Milton Friedman walk into a bar . . . (the mistaken association of null hypothesis testing with rigor)original ↗
28 May 2025
24 May 2025
23 May 2025
22 May 2025
Prior as data, prior as belief, prior as soft constraint, prior as unconditional distribution in a generative modeloriginal ↗
21 May 2025
21 May 2025
If only Arxiv required researchers to sign at the top rather than the bottom of the page, none of this would’ve happened.original ↗
19 May 2025
An alternative Monty Hall problem. As with the usual Monty Hall problem, just set it up as a probability tree and it all works outoriginal ↗
17 May 2025
Too many polls: “As news consumers, we’re like gluttons stuffing our faces with 5 potato chips at a time, just grabbing them out of the bag.”original ↗
16 May 2025
12 May 2025
11 May 2025
A study is conducted on two groups. When does it make sense to report two separate estimates, and when does it make sense to just report the pooled estimate?original ↗
10 May 2025
Back before he was a vaccine denier, law professor Richard Epstein was a cliche-spinning dispenser of misinformationoriginal ↗
9 May 2025
Misattribution (when someone claims you said something that you’ve never said)–it’s kind of like plagiarism in reverse.original ↗
7 May 2025
AISTATS ’25 Best Paper award—Margossian and Saul on exact recovery of means and correlation in VIoriginal ↗
6 May 2025
(again) Yeah, yeah, I understand why you’re all talking about accusations of fraud. But for the rest of us, it’s about the non-replication and the bad science, not about possible fraud and blameoriginal ↗
3 May 2025
2 May 2025
“They had it all but they wanted more”: Left-wing radicals in the 1960s and right-wingers noworiginal ↗
29 Apr 2025
Of plagues and chickens: How can someone be so skeptical in one place and so credulous somewhere else?original ↗
29 Apr 2025
Generalizing for Sampling and Causal Inference (my talk 3pm today at the University of Maryland)original ↗
28 Apr 2025
I don’t buy that claim that “eating whole foods and avoiding toxins” is a “horseshoe” alliance of the far left and far rightoriginal ↗
27 Apr 2025
Let’s take apart this claim by Christopher Lasch from 1977 that hasn’t aged well: “Such changes have made both racist ideology and the ideology of martial conquest, appropriate to an earlier age of empire-building, increasingly anachronistic.”original ↗
24 Apr 2025
“The difference between ‘significant’ and ‘not significant’ is not itself statistically significant” . . . in the wild!original ↗
23 Apr 2025
Friday 10am: Online conversation on “Experiments, Causal Inference, and Limits of Evidence” with Nancy Cartwright and Berna Devezeroriginal ↗
23 Apr 2025