Sign in

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛

@rmcelreath.bsky.social
18K followers 1.4K following 1.7K posts

Anthropologist - Bayesian modeling - science reform - cat and cooking content too - Director @ MPI for evolutionary anthropology www.eva.mpg.de/ecology/staff/richar…

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Lucas Secchim Ribeiro @secchimribeiro.bsky.social · 11h
Absolutely engaging talk from @rmcelreath.bsky.social at the Workshop for Data Management at the @unibonn.bsky.social! Data insurgents, unite! (epidemiologists and economists are also welcome 😂)
2101
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Once again grateful that one can get TeX source from arXiv papers, so that I didn't have to typeset Ramanujan's mad formula for pi myself (just an intro slide in a talk I am giving tomorrow)
a slide showing Ramanujan's formula for pi:

\frac{1}{\pi}=\frac{2\sqrt{2}}{9801}\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\frac{26390n+1103}{\left(n!\right)^4}\cdot \frac{\left(4n\right)!}{396^{4n}}
1420
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
It can be hard to define anthropology, because of the field's empirical and theoretical breadth. But an anthropologist is just someone who reads the headline below and yells SHERDS NOT SHARDS
1254
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Noa Kallioinen @n-kall.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
priorsense: an R package for prior and likelihood sensitivity checks v1.4.0 is now on CRAN News: - joined the @mc-stan.org project. Docs at mc-stan.org/priorsense and dev at github.com/stan-dev/pri... - reviewed by @ropensci.org - paper in @joss-openjournals.bsky.social - more vignettes
mc-stan.org
Prior Diagnostics and Sensitivity Analysis
Provides functions for prior and likelihood sensitivity analysis in Bayesian models. Currently it implements methods to determine the sensitivity of the posterior to power-scaling perturbations of the...
1287
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Biodiversity Pics @biodiversitypix.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
🦉 Birdcraft: . New York: Macmillan, 1895.. [Source]
Owl illustration from historical archives
0142
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Who were the sea peoples?! The last Neanderthals?!
2100
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Not the topic of the retracted paper, but it seems to claim that Neanderthals went extinct at the end of the Bronze Age, which is a marvelous idea for a new Christopher Nolan movie
Population Changes
Neanderthal man had become extinct in Europe by c.1200 B.C., so the population
figures for the succeeding centuries refer to Homo sapiens (Figure 7). The striking feature
is the enormous growth in numbers since the end of World War II. According to the UN,
this is expected to increase to 11–15 million people by the end of this century if nothing
3312
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
tag! @pymc-labs.bsky.social
010
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
hm there is the 2026 workflow paper arxiv.org/html/2409.04... but yeah it's not a tutorial of the kind we all need i guess. PyMC Labs has a recent video on the topic. I haven't worked through it yet, but their stuff is usually quite good. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsMF...
youtube.com
Hands-On Amortized Bayesian Inference
YouTube video by PyMC Labs
220
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
did you know that the word "amortize" comes from a Latin word meaning to make dead? anyway, this looks like a genuinely cool paper!
Figure 1: Graph processing pipeline. Graph description: Directed acyclic graph of a two-level model with population
mean µ, population standard deviation τ , group-level means {λj}, observations yji, and observation-level standard
deviation ω. The dashed box denotes that the group-level means λj and observations yji are sampled independently.
Graph expansion: The interior node λj is split into two conditionally independent instances λ1 and λ2, each receiving
the same parent nodes µ and τ . This makes the exchangeability of groups explicit in the graph structure, allowing the
inversion to determine that each instance conditions only on its own data and the global parameters. Graph inversion:
Inversion of the expanded two-level model using outer-nodes-first ordering (µ, τ, ω, λ1, λ2). In the inverse graph, each
λj conditions only on its own group data yj = {yji} and the global parameters µ, τ , ω, so the per-group inference
becomes amortizable: a single inference network can be used for all J groups. Network architecture: Architecture
derived from the inverse graph. Each inference network has its own summary network. The local summary network
encodes the observation of each group into a group-level summary, from which the local inference network infers
λj . The global summary network pools all observations into a single representation of the dataset, from which the
global inference network infers µ, τ , and ω. The dashed box denotes that the local summary and inference networks are
applied independently for each group.
1476
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Perfect score
Stan sampler output:

Chain 1 finished in 12.3 seconds.
Warning: 500 of 500 (100.0%) transitions ended with a divergence.
4821
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Guggenheim Collection @guggenheim.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Stables by Franz Marc, 1913 botfrens.com/collections/212/conten…
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection
0355
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I am very sympathetic to the Tomasello-like perspectives. I also think it's very difficult to test these theories empirically. I also think theory training in ev-anth and ev-psych is so poor that it is hard to have coherent, mathematical discussions of alternatives. Lots of work to do.
090
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This is no insult to chimpanzees. They are perfectly ordinary apes, and bog-standard evolutionary theory makes sense of them. We are the weird ones. It's no small problem that there is nothing like a consensus on how evolution produced human sociality.
3490
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
My priors about chimp anti-sociality confirmed: They stole from "friends" 61% of trials, from non-friends 70% of trials. Continues to be one of the biggest puzzles about human evolution, which mechanisms and evolutionary history make humans qualitatively more cooperative than other apes.
710821
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Mischka is weeks behind on the discourse but does not care
cat sleeping with head upright
0331
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I am still working on this, albeit slowly. Now working on phylogenetic partial pooling across species, where each species requires 4 parameters with their own covariance structure. It is working, but I feel dirty because I used a Kronecker product symbol, the Devil's multiplication.
If we needed just one parameter for each species, we would be done there. But we want to use the covariance matrix $\mathbf K$ to draw a vector of 4 parameters $\phi_s = [m_s,\log n_s,\mathrm{logit} \theta_s, \log \kappa_s ]$ for each species $s$ in $N$ total species. This requires that we also specify a covariance matrix $\Omega$ for the four parameters in $\phi$. The goal is to have the covariance between $\phi_{s,i}$ and $\phi_{t,j}$ be:
\begin{align}
	\mathrm{Cov}( \phi_{s,i} , \phi_{t,j} ) = K_{s,t} \, \Omega_{i,j}
\end{align}
which is just the product of the GP covariance between the species $s$ and $t$ and the covariance for the parameter types $i$ and $j$. The joint probability of every $\phi_s$ is then defined by a Kronecker product covariance matrix:
\begin{align}
	\mathrm{vec}(\Phi) \sim \mathrm{MVNormal}\left( 0 , \mathbf K \otimes \Omega \right)
\end{align}
4210
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Guggenheim Collection @guggenheim.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Several Circles by Vasily Kandinsky, 1926 botfrens.com/collections/212/conten…
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift

© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris
221534
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"why don't men wear more color." i only dress for the approval of dogs, who mostly see blue, white, gray, black, and brown in the way that we do, so i don't wear other colors.
1417718624
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Björn Jörges @bjorges.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Me on why I favor post-publication peer review:
Screenshot of an interview with Björk where she says: "The minute I start pleasing five peole, I won't please anyone. But if I only please myself, I might please ten people, you see."
0372
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fully expecting the next update to be: Excel now supports mean imputation by default
0741
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Thoughts and prayers for research data managers everywhere. You are not alone. We will get through this together techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/excelbl...
techcommunity.microsoft.com
Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell | Microsoft Community Hub
Lists, arrays in cells, and nested arrays introduce new ways to store and organize related information, helping you keep data together without sacrificing...
2842186
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Oh and the last lecture of my 2026 course (Hidden Markov models) explores the problem with equating behavior with strategy: www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuon...
youtube.com
Statistical Rethinking Lecture B10 - Hidden Markov Models
YouTube video by Richard McElreath
050
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I can't see any identification strategy in this paper. Do they assume that any learning after peering is social? I hope that isn't right. If so, that's variation in peering and exploration, not in learning strategies. Section 16.2 of my book has a computational example of what's wrong with this.
2171
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
yes ha ha ha yes
screenshot of weather app showing 6C morning temperature in Leipzig, Germany
0211
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
This model and the computation are a qualitative advance in using diverse data to estimate human growth patterns. Unlike most models, this one is biologically parameterized, not just curve fitting. Is cool.
Figure 2. Simulated cross-sectional height data for 100 individuals (black points), where the thick black line is the true population-mean growth trajectory and gray lines are true individual trajectories. Horizontal lines connect each point to the potentially-inaccurate “observed” age for that individual (blue circles), which incorporates uncertainty in the age recorded for each child during height measurement. Note that uncertainty tends to increase with age.
0454
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Beth Clarke @bethclarke.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Come work on a PhD in Metascience with me! There’s just a little over one week left to apply!
02522
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
honey wake up there is a new Map Men www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX21...
youtube.com
Why a Language Map of the World is Impossible
YouTube video by Map Men
1431
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I think Mischka wants something
cat with big eyes looking at the camera
1330
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Per Engzell @pengzell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Need new examples for teaching confounding and reverse causality to my undergrads. Send any published statistical crimes my way please.
7238
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
nothing like a bell
density function comparison of the profile of a typical church bell and a normal distribution with same mean and variance
082
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Okay, here's a Popper citation, using "intersubjektiv nachprüfbar", which I would gloss as Nachvollziehbar (traceable). Popper 2005 is "The Logic of Scientific Discovery". Link to text below for context: kritikdervernetztenvernunft.de/wissenschaft...
So einfach liegen die Dinge allerdings nicht. Popper schreibt: „Die Objektivität der wissenschaftlichen Sätze liegt darin, dass sie intersubjektiv nachprüfbar sein müssen.“ (2005, 21, Hervorhebungen im Original). Intersubjektives Nachprüfen bedeutet, dass ein Wissenschaftler seine Schlussfolgerungen und Ergebnisse so beschreibt, dass ein anderer Wissenschaftler sie überprüfen kann, und damit kommt die Gemeinschaft der Wissenschaftler ins Spiel.  Aber genau besehen beschreibt die Formulierung „intersubjektiv nachprüfbar“ keinen tatsächlich notwendigen sozialen Prozess, sondern eine Eigenschaft der Sätze innerhalb eines wissenschaftlichen Satzsystems. Sie bedeutet wegen der geforderten Ausschaltung des Psychologismus gerade, dass sie keinerlei Wünsche, Zweifel oder Forderungen eines Subjekts enthalten, sondern dass sie so formuliert sind, dass sie ganz ohne Kenntnis des Wissenschaftlers, der sie aufgeschrieben hat, und seiner konkreten persönlichen und sozialen Situation überprüft werden können. Streng genommen kann auch ein einziger Wissenschaftler das Kriterium der „intersubjektiven Überprüfbarkeit“ seiner Theorien sicherstellen. Popper fordert ja gerade, dass jeder Wissenschaftler so arbeitet, und er hält solches Arbeiten auch für eine Selbstverständlichkeit, etwa, wenn er schreibt: „Kein ernster Physiker wird je jene ‚okkulten Effekte‘, zu deren Reproduktion er keine Anweisungen geben kann, der wissenschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit als Entdeckung unterbreiten“ (2005, 22). Somit ist der Forderung der intersubjektiven Überprüfbarkeit auch damit genüge getan, wenn ein Wissenschaftler etwa nach einer gewissen Zeit seine eigenen Aufzeichnungen wieder zur Hand nimmt und dies – ohne sich an seine Überzeugungen, Hoffnungen oder Beobachtungen beim Aufzeichnen zu erinnern, überprüfen kann.
120
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Jane Lynch Glee meme, with text: I am going to create an environment that is so OXIC
1272
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Saw something about a proposed millennium prize in biology for reengineering Rubisco, so bumping this. Everyone worried AI is going to make a killer virus. But instead some botanist is going to kill us all with super-corn saturating the atmosphere in oxygen.
43810
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
there’s a phil sci pedigree to this, bc Popper emphasized the value of intersubjective traceability. i can find the exact citation when i am less on a train…
290
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Happy to see others emphasizing traceability (Nachvollziehbarkeit) over simple reproducibility. Let’s make fetch happen!
15511
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
your contributions are definitely appreciated!
100
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Lukas Röseler @aufdroeseler.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I just published my German Open Science book with @uni-muenster.de's library. It contains most of what I know about open science, can be understood by undergraduates, and is free. - published PDF: www.uni-muenster.de/Ebooks/index... - Quarto version: lukasroeseler.github.io/openscienceb...
12613
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
This is new from scientists in my department: economic data from 300 households and 15 years of forestry/climate records. Really trying to do both the human and the ecology in human ecology.
0286
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsterm...
de.wikipedia.org
Elstermühlgraben (Leipzig) – Wikipedia
010
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
the Leipzig paddler-lobby never misses www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEcf...
youtube.com
65 Jahre später: Leipzig hat seinen Elstermühlgraben zurück | Sachsen Fernsehen
YouTube video by Sachsen Fernsehen
170
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
Prof. Gillian Brown @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
🚨Call open for manuscripts on 'Metascience of the evolutionary human sciences' for a Special Collection in EHS, co-edited by @louisbachaud.bsky.social, @hclarkbarrett.bsky.social and myself. @ehbea.bsky.social @humbehevosoc.bsky.social @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
Call for papers
Welcome to Cambridge Core
12427
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
in above table, participants randomized to either left or right list. right list has one extra item (belief in god). so in expectation the difference in totals between right and left is estimate of proportion who are atheists. uncertainty will depend upon distribution though so poisson-binomial.
060
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
The odd case I was modeling is an "unmatched count analysis". If ppl are hesitant to state a belief/activity that is stigmatized, can be studied by asking "how many of these beliefs/behaviors" apply. Outcome is like binomial, but not binomial because prob of each is not equal. cite in alt
Table 1 from https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617707015
1140
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
SORTEE @sortee.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Interested in helping make science a better place? Nominations for 2027 #SORTEE volunteer positions are open now! With 10 committees to choose from and so many ways to get involved, we welcome everyone to volunteer with us! Nominations close 31st Oct. sortee.org/join/ #openscience
01319
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Back in 2018 I needed a custom poisson-binomial log-prob for Stan, so I wrote a clunky one, and then Bob I think wrote a more efficient one. Today poisson-binomial is built into the math library. For all your unusual mixture needs. (My use was for weird survey data)
screenshot of poisson-binomial documentation. link: https://mc-stan.org/docs/functions-reference/bounded_discrete_distributions.html#poisson-binomial
1423
Reposted by Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛
MC Stan @mc-stan.org · 17/09/2026
Release of CmdStan 2.40, including new Stan Math, core Stan, and Stanc, is now available! Blog post with new features blog.mc-stan.org/2026/09/16/r... Highlights - integrate_1d_double_exponential, a variadic version of old integrate_1d - integrate_1d_gauss_kronrod, a different quadrature rule ...
blog.mc-stan.org
Release of CmdStan 2.40
We are very happy to announce that the 2.40.0 release of CmdStan is now available on Github! As usual, the release of CmdStan is accompanied by new releases of Stan Math, core Stan, and Stanc3. Thi…
13116
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
yes one good thing about focusing on prior sensitivity is that we can use similar tools for data-model sensitivity. we need better theory for both and better software tools (importance sampling?) for both
020
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
lol flagged for adult content: it's Michelangelo's Creation of Adam
2100
Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛ @rmcelreath.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Ok I've caught up on work a bit so I'm allowing myself one meme as a treat (although I'd prefer a delicious Hlöllabát)
top: dog receiving a small meat treat from a worker at a sandwich shop, arm outstretched
bottom: Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam", which god's arm outstretched towards Adam
3656