19 September 2022
I will now roast myself and my scientific field. This is therapy designed to elicit self-criticism in myself and in my colleagues. The themes are real though. I have heard variations of them from diverse colleagues. This post coincides with this year’s annual Cultural Evolution Society meeting in Aarhus. I hope it incites some animated discussions.
13 September 2022
I was asked by a colleague here in Leipzig to participate in a panel discussion of “What unites quantitative and qualitative research approaches?” I don’t have well-formed opinions on this topic, and I’ve never written about it. So naturally I immediately agreed to participate.
2 September 2022
I’m very sorry but I am going to write about statistics and causal inference again. I’d much rather be doing science. I’ll make it brief.
6 January 2022
This story starts on twitter, but it gets better.
29 June 2021
Hyakujō’s Fox is a classic Zen kōan attested from the year 1036 CE [link]. It is surely much older. It gives the story of a monk who is transformed into a fox, because he denies that an enlightened person is subject to cause and effect. He is later freed when he realizes his error.
21 June 2021
15 June 2021
Okay so correlation does not imply causation. What now?
2 September 2018
You may not have heard of Alan Kay, but you’ve used his ideas. Kay is an American computer scientist who contributed major parts of some of the biggest ideas in human-computer systems, like graphical user interfaces. Kay and colleagues like Douglas Engelbart were part of the “golden age” of computer innovation, when teams of researchers got lots of support and freedom not only to solve defined problems but also to identify new ones.
14 July 2018
[updated 18 Dec 2019 — see second edition table of contents at bottom]
29 January 2018
Abstract: How to sample discrete parameters with Hamiltonian Monte Carlo and learn something about probability theory at the same time.