iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

(academdic, not pop-sci recs) - The Origins of Human Diet and Medicine: Chemical Ecology - Eating on the Wild Side: The Pharmacologic, Ecologic and Social Implications of Using Noncultigens

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Hadas Weiss @hadas.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

In what follows, I will resolve the contradiction I made up

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

any psychologist can make another psychologist. like with knights, or vampires

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

And big thanks to @jsmartin.bsky.social and @jaeggiadrian.bsky.social for sticking around on the long haul to get this paper out!

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Methods in Ecology and Evolution @methodsinecoevol.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

🏅 Shortlisted for the 2025 Robert May prize! 🏅 In his paper, @jsmartin.bsky.social proposes a statistical model for detecting how complex, continuously varying environments shape the expression of and association among multiple organismal traits 🌍 Read more here 👇

buff.ly

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

Whenever I teach the normal distribution I have students make a bivariate scatter plot of the draws from two independent std normals

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 04/02/2026

New preprint! So, what's a multiverse analysis good for anyway?> With @jessicahullman.bsky.social and @statmodeling.bsky.social juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...

What’s a multiverse good for anyway?

Julia M. Rohrer, Jessica Hullman, and Andrew Gelman

Multiverse analysis has become a fairly popular approach, as indicated by the present special issue on the matter. Here, we take one step back and ask why one would conduct a multiverse analysis in the first place. We discuss various ways in which a multiverse may be employed – as a tool for reflection and critique, as a persuasive tool, as a serious inferential tool – as well as potential problems that arise depending on the specific purpose. For example, it fails as a persuasive tool when researchers disagree about which variations should be included in the analysis, and it fails as a serious inferential tool when the included analyses do not target a coherent estimand. Then, we take yet another step back and ask what the multiverse discourse has been good for and whether any broader lessons can be drawn. Ultimately, we conclude that the multiverse does remain a valuable tool; however, we urge against taking it too seriously.

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 13/12/2025

Knew it would be Rohrer et al before following the links :)

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

But it raises so many questions. Most importantly: who are the"gold standard" agers in the training data that you are comparing to?

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

I think the main practical reason to do it is to re-use trained models in new samples. But somewhere along the line this practically gets morphed into "the errors are biologically meaningful" rather than just "some model trained in a different sample predicted this new person's age badly"

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

I know a little bit about these types of analyses (not this study specifically)--they are beyond causal salad. They interpret residual errors of a machine learning algorithm (actual age - predicted) as a 'aging acceleration/deceleration'. Literal noise-mining.

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Correlated observation-level random effects

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

correlated observation-level random effects

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Yes, and the culture evolves. Gelman claims that model checking was not part Bayesian culture in the 90s: statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/03/18/c...

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

Confusion about Bayesian model checking | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

"Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were Irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.” www.nytimes.com/1971/03/25/a...

nytimes.com

The Wisdom of the Orient (Published 1971)

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

"This is the law by which the intelligence despises law, and you encourage its violence! You are in love with Intelligence, until it frightens you. For your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint." 3/n

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

"A man intoxicated on it believes his own thoughts are legal decisions or facts themselves born of the crowd and time. He confuses his quick changes of heart with the imperceptible variation of real forms and enduring beings" 2/n

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

"For you, intelligence is not one thing among many. Every day it devours everything. It would like to put an end to a new state of society every morning." 1/n

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Charles Driver @charlesdriver.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Postdoc position open in Zurich -- Prof. Martin Tomasik and I have a joint SNF project on interpretable neural network approaches for large scale, complex item / temporal structure, online learning / cognitive development data. Please retweet. tinyurl.com/PostdocGNNSNF

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 09/06/2025

For the XL voice messagers in her life, my wife listens on 2x speed...

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something so simultaneously absurd and disturbing: the House will vote Monday on a bill that would punish Americans for participating in boycotts of Israel with fines of up to $1 MILLION or prison terms up to TWENTY YEARS.

🚨NEWS: The House is set to vote Monday on H.R. 867, the “IGO Anti-Boycott Act,” which would punish Americans with fines of up to $1 million or prison terms up to 20 years for participating in boycotts of Israel or Israeli settlements that are promoted by international governmental organizations (IGOs), such as the UN or EU.

The bill, sponsored by pro-Israel lawmaker Rep. Mike Lawler, expands U.S. anti-boycott law to target voluntary, values-based political action by U.S. citizens. Its aim is to shield Israel from nonviolent international pressure campaigns such as BDS.

Rights groups say the legislation criminalizes constitutionally protected political expression and is part of a broader push to suppress opposition to Israeli genocide, apartheid, and illegal settlement expansion, under the guise of fighting antisemitism.

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

If you calculate marginal effects at the level of the ordinal response, then it shouldn't matter whether the effect is captured by the thresholds as opposed to a predictor tho, right?

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Excited to share that I’ve started a new role as Principal Data Scientist with @pymc-labs.bsky.social. I’m working with and learning from an amazing group of people to do applied Bayesian modeling and advance open-source @pymc.io libraries.

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Maybe this is the easiest way to understand it: you are never just adding more data with these analyses. More data implies a more complex model because it adds to the tree structure/history you are modelling. So you can end up with less precision when adding more data.

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 02/01/2025

Very unsure if this is a similar phenomenon, but I have seen something like this happen when simulating from phylogenetic models, where power can depend on how "tippy vs branchy" the tree. But nobody has an estimand in PCMs so power per se isn't necessarily the right way to think about it

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Jarrett Byrnes @jebyrnes.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

OK, here is a very rough draft of a tutorial for #Bayesian #SEM using #brms for #rstats. It needs work, polish, has a lot of questions in it, and I need to add a references section. But, I think a lot of folk will find this useful, so.... jebyrnes.github.io/bayesian_sem... (use issues for comments!)

jebyrnes.github.io

Full Luxury Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling with brms

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Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 06/12/2024

Ah, I found what I was looking for! From Imai et al.'s "Unpacking the Black Box of Causality" (2011). This is coming from the angle of two experiments in which you identify A -> B and B -> C and why you cannot infer the average causal mediation effect from that.

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 06/12/2024

my recommenders are bi-modal since becoming a parent

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

@solomonkurz.bsky.social's post is a much better introduction to OLREs, mine had a narrower aim of reminding ppl that trusting the default behavior of any stats software will burn you, even when the defaults are good.

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Not yet. My context is seeking principled way to deal with the spaces between behavior. Often ambiguous whether the dead time between behaviors is a distinct "rest" state or instead just a short pause. Matters a lot for Markov models if A -> B or A -> Rest -> B.

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

And was humbled again recently implementing latent multi-state (competing hazards) models in Stan

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

Time-to-event analyses taught me more about statistics than any other modelling exercise.

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Adrian Jaeggi @jaeggiadrian.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

🚨 JOB ALERT!! We're looking for a PhD student to join our group! Are you interested in evolutionary medicine / anthropology? Already have a master's? Apply with your own project ideas! See link: jobs.uzh.ch/job-vacancie... #EvMed @bioanth.org @ehbea.bsky.social Please RT!

jobs.uzh.ch

UZH: PhD position in evolutionary anthropology and medicine

The Human Ecology Group of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine (IEM) Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, led by Prof. Adrian Jaeggi, is inviting applications from prospe...

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Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

Our JSS article is out! And now I get to focus on {marginaleffects} 1.0.0. Stay tuned. www.jstatsoft.org/article/view...

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Paul Bürkner @paulbuerkner.com · 26/11/2024

Prior specification is one of the hardest tasks in Bayesian modeling. In our new paper, we (Florence Bockting, @stefanradev.bsky.social and me) develop a method for expert prior elicitation using generative neural networks and simulation-based learning. arxiv.org/abs/2411.15826

arxiv.org

Expert-elicitation method for non-parametric joint priors using normalizing flows

We propose an expert-elicitation method for learning non-parametric joint prior distributions using normalizing flows. Normalizing flows are a class of generative models that enable exact, single-step...

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Jordan S. Martin @jsmartin.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Our updated EcoEvoRxiv preprint "Estimating (non)linear selection on reaction norms: A general framework for labile traits" is now live. Work done in collaboration with Yimen Araya-Ajoy, Niels Dingemanse, @ali--wilson.bsky.social, and David Westneat. ecoevorxiv.org/repository/v...

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

Conversely, the tools of “exploratory” data analysis lend more credibility and clarity to scientific claims than statistical testing ever could.

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Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚢𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 0.6.1 for #Rstats is out! It's an ultra simple, super flexible, and 0-dependency package to draw beautiful tables in HTML, LaTeX, Typst, Word, PDF, and PNG. And for those who ❤️ documentation, 𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚢𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 ships with a billion pages of tutorials: vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

New blog post (and uh, new blog!) If you use observation-level random effects (e.g., for over-dispersed counts), your predictive checks are probably wrong. Here's how to do it the right way in both #brms and #PyMC. tl;dr: you need to sample new levels of the OLRE to avoid a false goodness-of-fit

erikringen.github.io

The right way to do predictive checks with observation-level random effects – Erik J. Ringen, PhD

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 25/09/2023

This primer on between/within effects (using Mundlak device) is the paper I pull-up more often than any other during stats consultations. Better approaches exist (latent mean centering) but the explanations and figures here are top notch. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Erik Ringen @err-ring.bsky.social · 22/09/2023

Teaching statistics to grad students this semester. Reading Freedman's anti-regression piece "Statistical Models and Shoe Leather" (paper brought to my attention by @edhagen.net) next week to calibrate expectations. Tag urself on his ordinal scale of pessimism.

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