I think the problem here is that most people who do epidemiological research - including many who might call themselves 'epidemiologists' - have not actually had any epidemiology training. I wish it was a protected title. With an exam that would require proving you understand residual confounding!

For example, current evidence is that LLMs rely too much on interpolation rather than discovering underlying invariant causal abstractions.

This appears to be a very problematic weaponization of casual reasoning that feels 'rigorous' because it involves a selective presentation of evidence. Some very excellent researchers have looked into the problems from air pollution. #CausalSky #MetaSky www.theguardian.com/technology/n...

Inside a plan to use AI to amplify doubts about the dangers of pollutants

Risk analyst Tony Cox’s work has been backed by the chemical lobby, and some health experts are alarmed

theguardian.com

Exactly > The people who care about a topic enough to research it will often have ideological motivations. The ideological influence is there. That doesn’t mean it’s bad science.

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? statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/20/n...

Every few years there is a new article like this, but not much will change unless scientists stop relying on GraphPad Prism that doesn't offer any of this and have something they can use more easily. LLM powered workflows might change this going forward.

Jason Moore@moorejh.bsky.social · last yr.

A brief guide to statistical analysis of grouped data in preclinical research www.nature.com/articles/s42... #datascience #bioinformatics #statistics #mlsky

Unless you are using inferential clustering methods that are designed to severely test any hypotheses against the baseline that "how often would you find clusters if the data was generated by these high dimensional null patterns or if data were corrupted by structured measurement error"

Kevin M. King@kevinmking.bsky.social · last yr.

1) LCAs are designed to find classes. So when a paper's Aim I is "We'll use LCA to see if there are classes", it's like saying "We're going to estimate a mean and see if there's an SD". It's that dumb

Can you demonstrate the extent and degree of different kinds of sequential selection biases from a #CausalSky #StatSky #MedSky perspective in public clinical trial datasets? DM me if you are interested. For instance in TrialBench? github.com/ML2Health/ML...

ML2ClinicalTrials/Trialbench at main · ML2Health/ML2ClinicalTrials

Contribute to ML2Health/ML2ClinicalTrials development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

She wrote this in May…

Can’t take it with you

I am in hospice care and reflecting a lot on what a good life is.

open.substack.com

the Mesoscopic Integrated Neuroimaging Data (MIND) platform will soon be opening also for outside researchers leveraging our new 15.2 T 🐁 MRI, SHIELD clearing and fully upgraded lightsheet microscope plus computational resources developed by @neuroak.bsky.social to handle large datasets.

Marco A. Maximo Prado@maximoprado.bsky.social · last yr.

Great news just announced. @neuroak.bsky.social is leading a new funded @braincanada.bsky.social platform that promises to revolutionize the study of neurodegeneration by tackling Patho-connectomics Merging MRI and lightsheet analysis in new models of disease www.schulich.uwo.ca/about/news-e...

Neurobullshit is alive and well in education research. Reminds me of the good old days of @neuroskeptic.bsky.social on this 10+ years ago

Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · last yr.

I think the conclusion of this study is likely to be valid however it is worth noting that any attempts to localise cognitive tasks such as writing to a specific brain activation/connectivity is problematic because that's not how the brain works. 1/

Also, longitudinal studies don't fix causality problems. Fortunately, they help you discover entirely new kinds of confounding.

Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · last yr.

To re-up this, this also applies to latent growth curve models 😭 😭 😭 No, I'm afraid you cannot solve a fundamental identification problem by applying a latent growth curve model.

If you use a model dialogically, it’s effectively guiding you through the free-writing/revision cycle composition teachers recommend. I get why this mode of use isn’t very visible. All the rhetoric around AI has been that it’s “generative” and does the work for you. Things like the “Dear Sydney” +

5 years later, it is finally on youtube. Thanks @ohbmofficial.bsky.social youtu.be/X5syQN9ZkQE?... #neuroskyence #CausalSky

👀 A performative prediction paper

MAPS Project@mapsproject.bsky.social · last yr.

Group member Philippe van Basshuysen's paper "When Predictions are More Than Predictions: Self-Fulfilling Performativity and the Road Towards Morally Responsible Predictive Systems" has just been accepted for publication www.academia.edu/129990683/Wh...

What’s common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders? The vast majority of archival documents are neither digitized nor searchable online. 🗃️

Peter Sagal@petersagal.bsky.social · last yr.

What’s common knowledge in your field but shocks outsiders? Not everything you think should be said out loud.

Reductionism never falls out of fashion because one has to embrace theory to question it.

Philip Ball@philipcball.bsky.social · last yr.

That's partly why I wrote How Life Works. This idea that if we understand the molecules/genes then we understand the biology is corrosive - evidently even at the highest levels.

FDR metrics only offer error-control of the false discovery proportion under expectation. It is already a liberal standard of evidence when you realize that. Most don't. If one wants to defend a paper in nature, you might find AI reasoning agents quite useful to check your work. #StatSky 🖥️ 🧬 📈💻

What was interesting to me was that, despite my best efforts, SCB was unable to understand that this was a framing of the observations, and not simply a description of them. The response was that to be curious about this framing revealed total ignorance of the field, despite the following... /3

Awesome answers. Can we have a follow-up meta science workshop?

Dan Levenstein@dlevenstein.bsky.social · last yr.

Serious question: why is theory development in neuroscience so damn hard?

The generous variation is that the assumption is mechanisms are separable, can be studied independently and then combined together in a way that will converge to the truth.

Dr Nick@nmwilkinson.eurosky.social · last yr.

Brace, brace: neuro-centrism, cos the brain is treated like an isolated solution, divorced from body and behaviour

Apart from at a few over-plucked trees, for many subtopics it is not clear how to make a good theoretical contribution to the area. Involves inventing new plucking tools, deciding which fruit are both within grasp and edible for your experimental colleagues

This is very interesting. It is indeed problematic that psychotherapy efficaciousness is not being evaluated. But I'm not sure about the anesthetic analogy. The problem is that the two together represent a kind of non-additive therapeutic interaction in a way that isn't necessary with anesthesia.

Max Wolff@trpwolff.bsky.social · last yr.

With Natalie Gukasyan, @leorroseman.bsky.social & @pliknaitzky.bsky.social LINK to the article: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I wish some of the folks with terminated grants- especially Harvard, Columbia folks - would post the summary statements from NIH study sections about their grants. The public should know what independent scientists thought about the projects that are being terminated. #PublicHealth #EpiSky #EndAlz

One reason I hate the term "Polynomial Regression" so much is because linear regression means "linear in parameters", not "linear in variables". I'm not calling it logarithmic regression either when logging some variables. Still linear regression. Stop making squaring a variable sound like magic.

Not a single AI science agent paper I've read so far tackles the issue that actual scientific discovery bears no resemblance to the hypothetico-deductive veneer given by the papers describing results. So asking agents to match the literature and/or solve problems in this way feels very off ...

> If you become too focused on a particular therapeutic hypothesis, you lose sight of the fact that you may be wrong with respect to your assumptions. You’re always going to make assumptions, just don’t forget what they are. That way if things go wrong you can figure out which assumption was ❌

Manjari Narayan | @Neurostats@neurostats.org · last yr.

How innovation that goes beyond current trends happens in industry — you have to do things under the table outside of your day job commitments.

How innovation that goes beyond current trends happens in industry — you have to do things under the table outside of your day job commitments.

Thiago Carvalho@cyrilpedia.bsky.social · last yr.

'The turning point was a meeting of the Soc. for the Biological Therapy of Cancer (...) I had been invited to organize a workshop and asked along my Genentech coll. Mark Sliwkowski(...) We heard Suzanne Topalian talk about the first Medarex trials of PD1 & PDL1 inhibitors' #Immunology #Immunotherapy

This is a great interview of Ira Mellman on the history and future of cancer immunotherapy 🧪🩺

Thiago Carvalho@cyrilpedia.bsky.social · last yr.

'The turning point was a meeting of the Soc. for the Biological Therapy of Cancer (...) I had been invited to organize a workshop and asked along my Genentech coll. Mark Sliwkowski(...) We heard Suzanne Topalian talk about the first Medarex trials of PD1 & PDL1 inhibitors' #Immunology #Immunotherapy

Besides, Gantmacher isn't the flex he thinks. This is the flex (in the original Russian, of course): www.amazon.com/Finite-Dimen...

Finite-Dimensional Linear Analysis: A Systematic Presentation in Problem Form (Dover Books on Mathematics)

This remarkable book develops the subject of linear algebra in a novel fashion. A logically interconnected sequence of propositions and problems—some 2,400 in all—appears without proofs. Assisted only...

amazon.com

I suspect this will become a new kind of sabbatical/retreat experience for adults too.

Joshua Loftus@joft.bsky.social · last yr.

Universities should create internet-free zones and run semesters in conditions like Survivor reality TV shows. There are only a few books, pencils and paper, lab/experiment equipment, sharing a few very old and slow computers without internet