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alex hayes

@alexpghayes.com
4.7K followers 2K following 484 posts

assistant prof @ oregon state statistics. networks, causal inference, contagion, measurement error, #rstats. he/him www.alexpghayes.com

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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 13/08/2026
very cool investigation into consequences of the friendship paradox
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Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social · 11/08/2026
Nice post from @eytan.adar.prof on the cargo cult science of "AI-native" PhD students, who come in super productive because they perform all major parts of research with genAI. No one needs all these quick papers, and they can really hurt students down the road. eytanadar.medium.com/ai-native-ph...
eytanadar.medium.com
AI-Native PhD Students
If you’re a student and just want the tl;dr, feel free to jump to the end.
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Adam L @adam-lg.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
My argument would be more: we shouldn't be teaching people's one stats class as "here's a cookbook of tests to get a p-value"
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Nick Strayer @nstrayer.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
Check out the blog post Wasim and Cindy Tong wrote announcing the GA launch: opensource.posit.co/blog/2026-07... Give it a try and let us know how you get on!
opensource.posit.co
Positron's Jupyter Notebook Editor Is Now Generally Available
The Positron Jupyter Notebook editor is now generally available, bringing a first-class notebook experience with built-in environment management, interactive data exploration, streamlined version cont...
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 29/07/2026
I'll be at New Researchers Conference 2026 this weekend chatting about some recent work on estimating peer effects in noisy networks! arxiv.org/abs/2605.03204
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 29/06/2026
Some LaTeX resources I'd appreciate: - A modern guide to best LaTeX practices - A concise guide to mathematical writing - Typst <-> LaTeX conversion gotchas - Claude skills for all of the above
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 12/06/2026
@grimalkina.bsky.social i love your learning-opportunities claude skill -- do you know of anything similar for web chat interfaces? the web interface is much nicer than clis when discussing math since it renders latex i'm curious about user prompts both for myself and also to suggest to students!
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 22/05/2026
i'm looking for interesting teaching examples where (1) random effects/multilevel models predict better than glmnet (2) glmnet predicts better than random effects #rstats #statistics
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Thomas Dietterich @tdietterich.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
We are implementing a similar policy at @arxiv.bsky.social. If there is incontrovertible evidence of LLM slop in a paper, this means the authors did not take the time to read the LLM output and we can't trust anything else in the paper. Penalty is 1 year ban from arXiv followed by...
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 06/05/2026
new print! keith levin and i came with a new approach to estimating peer effects in noisy, low-rank networks i'm very excited about our idea because the approach works with a variety of different noise processes arxiv.org/abs/2605.03204
Screenshot of the first page of the pre-print, showing the title, abstract and first paragraph of the text.
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Noah Greifer @noahgreifer.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
This is the clearest and most accessible introduction to DML I've ever read: arxiv.org/abs/2504.08324 Congrats to the authors @aahrens.bsky.social, @markeschaffer.bsky.social, et al on this amazing paper and great accompanying R package! I'm now DML-pilled.
arxiv.org
An Introduction to Double/Debiased Machine Learning
This paper provides an introduction to Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML). DML is a general approach to performing inference about a target parameter in the presence of nuisance functions: objects...
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 15/04/2026
what's the recommended workflow for checking the accessibility of a #quarto website? currently i'm setting format: html: axe: output: document in _quarto.yml and checking every page visually and it's not particularly efficient #rstats
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Hadley Wickham @hadley.nz · 20/03/2026
We have summer internships y'all! Come work at Posit on the PyData, tidymodels, shiny, or Connect teams: grnh.se/tigz810a3us. You will have an awesome time, learn a ton, and help advance our open source and pro tools 🧰 #rstats #pydata
Kermit the frog screaming with excitement
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 14/03/2026
Claude skills for reviewing manuscripts that I would appreciate: - stylistic advice for math writing (punctuating eqs, etc) - academic tropes (gaps, see quote) and linguistic oddities (gerund form) to avoid - structure of a good abstract/introduction - etc
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G Elliott Morris @gelliottmorris.com · 13/03/2026
Strength In Numbers is looking for a smart part-time survey research assistant (or a few) www.gelliottmorris.com/p/strength-i...
gelliottmorris.com
Strength In Numbers is looking for smart survey research assistants
Note: Not a full-time job, but I will pay you — probably best for a smart undergrad or grad student or side hustle-r
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Mor Naaman @informor.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
This might be the biggest job in (open) science. Cornell is creating a new non-profit organization to house @arxiv.bsky.social -- and hiring a new person to lead it. jobs.chronicle.com/job/37961678...
jobs.chronicle.com
Chief Executive Officer - New York City, New York (US) job with arXiv | 37961678
arXiv seeks its first CEO to champion open, free scientific discovery and guide the platform’s next chapter as an independent nonprofit.
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Noam Ross @noamross.net · 06/03/2026
Grant Witness is hiring! We're seeking a full-time data scientist to join our team building data resources to support journalism, litigation, and activism protecting science, public health, and the rule of law. grant-witness.us/apply.html #rstats
grant-witness.us
Job Opening: Data Scientist – Grant Witness
Grant Witness seeks a data scientist for a full-time position on our team tracking changes to U.S. federal grantmaking. We are also hiring for part-time/contract positions. Join us!
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 07/03/2026
once again learning the painful lesson that i need to pick a color scheme and set the correct page size before polishing my tikz figure 🥲
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Tiago Peixoto @tiago.skewed.de · 20/02/2026
New on the arxiv: “Graphs are maximally expressive for higher-order interactions” arxiv.org/abs/2602.16937 We clarify central misconceptions in the recent literature on "higher-order networks". w/ @piratepeel.bsky.social , @manlius.bsky.social, and @thilogross.bsky.social Explainer 🧵: 1/N
arxiv.org
Graphs are maximally expressive for higher-order interactions
We demonstrate that graph-based models are fully capable of representing higher-order interactions, and have a long history of being used for precisely this purpose. This stands in contrast to a commo...
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 20/02/2026
Is there an #rstats package to visualize how many observations get dropped by each exclusion criteria? Looking for a nice visual way to summarize a sample
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Kenny Peng @kennypeng.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
New paper! The Linear Representation Hypothesis is a powerful intuition for how language models work, but lacks formalization. We give a mathematical framework in which we can ask and answer a basic question: how many features can be stored under the hypothesis? 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2602.11246
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Tiffany Timbers @tiffanytimbers.bsky.social · 04/02/2026
"Ten simple rules for teaching data science": arxiv.org/abs/2602.02874 A new preprint by @minecr.bsky.social and myself. We'd love any feedback!
arxiv.org
Ten simple rules for teaching data science
Teaching data science presents unique challenges and opportunities that cannot be fully addressed by simply borrowing pedagogical strategies from its parent disciplines of statistics and computer scie...
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 04/02/2026
Quick gist to pull census crosstabs: - age x sex x educ - age x sex x race - sex x race x educ to use during post-stratification gist.github.com/alexpghayes/...
gist.github.com
tidycensus-pull-mrp-crosstabs.R
GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 04/02/2026
Question for the pollsters: are there any public repos with census data/code to pull census data for re-weighting surveys with Mr. P?
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 02/02/2026
At long last @zotero.org has an Android app!
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 23/01/2026
Solidarity with everyone striking against ICE in MN and elsewhere If you'd like to do something: I'll match up to $100 in donations to any of the organizations listed on www.standwithminnesota.com
standwithminnesota.com
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Arman Oganisian @stablemarkets.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
I'm looking forward to teaching a 4-hour short course on Bayesian sensitivity analysis methods at the American Causal Inference Conference (ACIC) 2026! Register here: sci-info.org/annual-meeti...
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 13/01/2026
In a shocking turns of events, making a small change to my simulations did in fact fix everything
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 08/12/2025
I just finished @gelliottmorris.com's delightful Strength in Numbers and I'm excited to read more about opinion research and polling Let me know if you have recommendations for followup reading!
Cover of "Strength in Numbers"
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Cameron Patrick @cameronpat.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
which is the worse statistical sin, multiplying regression coefficients (mediation) or dividing regression coefficients (instrumental variables)
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 25/11/2025
Keith and I strengthened our lower bounds for randomized experiments in the linear-in-means model to a general minimax result Updated results available at arxiv.org/abs/2410.10772
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Gavin Simpson @gsimpson.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
A new release of the mgcv #RStats 📦 is out on CRAN and Simon Wood (U Edinburgh) has added some significant new features despite the small bump in version number: 🌟 scasm() for estimating GAMs with shape constrained smooths. Can be used with any family & smoothness selection is via the EFS method
Model is:

b3 <- scasm(
  y ~ s(x0, bs = "bs", k= k) + s(x1, bs = "sc", xt = "m+", k = k) +
         s(x2, bs = "bs", k = k) + s(x3, bs = "bs", k = k),
  family=poisson, bs=200
)

The second smooth `s(x1) is a shape constrained smooth with a positive monotonicity constraint (xt = "m+").

The `bs = 200` arguments uses 200 boostrap samples, which generates bootstrap distributions for each coefficient in the model. These bootstrap samples respect the shape constraints, while the usual +/- 2 SE credible intervals may not.

The uncertainty in the partial effects is shown by two credible interval bands; a dark blue central band is a 68% Bayesian credible interval, while the lighter blue outer interval is a 95% Bayesian credible interval.

The background of each panel is light grey with white grid lines, in a similar style to ggplot2's default theme.
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 04/11/2025
What are your favorite books/articles/resources about graphic design for academic posters and presentations?
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Aki Vehtari @avehtari.bsky.social · 03/11/2025
Now I'm also looking for a research software engineer to implement a pile of research results to R packages loo, posterior, bayesplot, projpred, priorsense, brms or/and Python packages ArviZ, Bambi and Kulprit. Apply by email with no specific deadline (see contact info at users.aalto.fi/~ave/)
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 24/10/2025
this thread nicely describes the epistemology of a decent portion of modern meta-science, and i think also explains why it lost steam
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 18/10/2025
I missed that an expanded version of Philip Stark's "Pay No Attention to the Model Behind the Curtain" was published a few years back Needless to say it's very good and worth a read link.springer.com/10.1007/s000...
Screenshot of the first page of "Pay No Attention to the Model Behind the Curtain" by Philip Stark
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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 14/10/2025
This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good: dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...
A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 12/10/2025
Just read a referee report clearly generated by AI and I really hope journals start requiring Gen AI disclosures in referee reports
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sarah @sarahjohnson.io · 21/08/2025
I was loving Claude Code... until I tried it with #rstats. Constant errors, wouldn't use the tidyverse even when asked, "optimized" functions were slower. Frustrated, I started a session just to teach R to Claude and summarize what it learned into a CLAUDE.md file gist.github.com/sj-io/3828d6...
gist.github.com
Claude R Tidyverse Expert
Claude R Tidyverse Expert. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 31/08/2025
nice guide to making github profiles (especially academic ones) legible to others!
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arxiv.stat.ME @arxiv-stat-me.bsky.social · 12/08/2025
Subhankar Bhadra, Michael Schweinberger Causal Inference Under Network Interference arxiv.org/abs/2508.06808
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Richard D. Morey @richarddmorey.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
Also, we think people should stop using forensic meta-analytic techniques that have not been adequately vetted by experts in statistics. The p curve papers have very little statistical detail, and were published in psych journals. They did not get scrutiny appropriate to their popularity. 15/?
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Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
This workshop is going to be great fun, and I really look forward to meeting everyone! It would mean a lot to me if you signed up!
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 01/08/2025
I'll be #JSM2025 from Sun Aug 3 - Thurs Aug 7 Excited to chat with folks! These days I'm thinking about: - peer effects - measurement error in networks - stochastic blockmodels and friends - causal inference on networks - semi-parametric mediation & transportability - #rstats
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Emily Riederer @emilyriederer.bsky.social · 27/07/2025
Technical writing is hard bcs "writing is thinking" but we often should tell our story not in the order we worked. Solution? I wrote a quick post on how @quarto.org 's embed shortcodes can reframe technical writing as reproducible evidence curation www.emilyriederer.com/post/quarto-... 🧵 (1/n)
emilyriederer.com
How Quarto embed fixes data science storytelling | Emily Riederer
Literate programming excels at capturing our stream of conscience. Our stream of conscience does not excel at explaining the impact of our work. Notebooks enable some of data scientists’ worst tendenc...
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 23/07/2025
Do folks know about A/B testing datasets where information about guardrail metrics is released alongside outcomes? #rstats #datascience #kaggle
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 19/07/2025
boosting for the weekend crowd
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 18/07/2025
Any tips and tricks for @typst.app <-> LaTeX translations? Pandoc is struggling with custom macros for notation and I'm weary of LLMs for technical writing (plus context window issues)
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 15/07/2025
~~ making sense of academic statistics ~~ i wrote about the confusing relationship between statistics and data analysis, and also about how statistics relates to science #statistics #rstats #datascience www.alexpghayes.com/post/making-...
Screenshot of the text of the linked blogpost 1/4Screenshot of the text of the linked blogpost 2/4Screenshot of the text of the linked blogpost 3/4Screenshot of the text of the linked blogpost 4/4
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alex hayes @alexpghayes.com · 11/07/2025
I've invested a lot into LaTeX in the last few years and didn't feel a strong desire to pivot, but I just tried @typst.app and I'm an immediate convert The compilation speed is so nice and it's so much easier to understand
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