Will Lowe
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conjugateprior.org
Will Lowe
@conjugateprior.org

Señor Research Scientist, NPC at the Hertie School in Berlin 🇩🇪 via Princeton, Mannheim, Edinburgh and a bunch of other ivory towers that will probably be billiard balls and decorative boxes by the end of the decade.

Rome Statute appreciator. .. more

Computer science 32%
Political science 28%
Pinned
For Monty Hall problem aficionados: a #causal DAG, with explanation in the alt text.

Who knew that the M in M-bias stood for Monty?

On the other hand probabilistic inference, that is to say conditioning, is (notoriously) not monotonic: e.g. P(B | A) may be k but who knows about P(B | A, Z) and P(B |A, Z, Q)? They could be more or less anything else.

best described imho as "logical (pejorative)"

Classical logics tend to be monotonic, in the sense that if A implies B then A & Z also imply B. When inference has this property the intuition " I should drop Zs into the conjunction one by one to check that A is the one that's getting B" is not nuts.

This is all completely inexcusable when operating in English too:

"So you'd like to explain something? You want to ask *why?* Well that's great, but do remember that the answer to all 'why?' questions starts with 'because'. Not 'bessociates', 'becorrelates' or 'besignificantly different from zero'.

Meh, a business school prof with a youtube channel.

Still perhaps it was inevitable that evopsych became toxic branding and respectable work retreated to biological / evolutionary anthropology departments and tried to fly under the radar.

(fwiw my evopsych objection is to the psych, not the evo)

There's related logic on the other side of things, in that if you had a suitably friendly statistic s and were interested in being able to rule out a particular value, say \theta=2, then, in a similar logic, P(s(Y) | \theta=2) is a distribution you might be interested in tail areas of.

Maybe "prior as unconditional distribution [of the observations]"? That is, if you have prior on parameters theta, then (roughly) \int P(Y | theta) P(theta) d theta is what the distribution of what this prior expects you would observe - the 'prior predictive distribution', in the jargon.

"Reform introduces new 'bang to rights' policy"

Great news: Gläßel & Scharpf's Making a Career in Dictatorship is *finally* out

It's great stuff & one of my favourite sources of collider bias examples. However, these are modest & retiring guys so under no circumstances should you chase them down at conferences & loudly insist they sign your copy
Here is what the book is about in a nutshell.
👇

Huh. I've not seen quotations marks used this way. Also, while math bio is ordinary enough to have an NSF program I can imagine the math of biology could seem odd (I live in a weird info environment, so 🤷🏻)

By sophistry I guess you mean the caption's doctored. Where might I read more about this?

imo the weird thing about the HS great books version is that although they do leave a lot out, what's there has so much internal variation that will jump out under even light intellectual prodding that it's hard to miss the basic implausibility of an actual monolith under all the unitary rhetoric.

Characteristically, for the inventors of foi gras, they hold his nose closed with the padded pliers, turn this device on its side and open the tap at the top for the required amount every centijour*.

*because Lagrange, obvs.

You have to be kidding. Where do I sign?
I sometimes worry our advertising material isn’t as welcoming as it might be

'Among these were Edge darlings Martin Nowak, a “mathematical biologist”, and evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers'

I don't really get why evolutionary biologists are real but mathematical biologists get scare quotes.

And, apropos Dennett, this correction/adjustment/fudge is interesting:

Reposted by Will Lowe

Here is what the book is about in a nutshell.
👇

Reposted by Will Lowe

I sometimes worry our advertising material isn’t as welcoming as it might be

in this moral economy?

Reposted by Cyrus Samii

Folks, some news. No, not that kind of news – what do you think this is, LinkedIn? It's this:

1. The applied causal graphs workshop deadline is 28th Feb. so get your abstracts in and hang out with us in Potsdam this May. Form and description is below

2. @dagophile.bsky.social is giving a keynote 🥳
Applied Causal Graphs 2026
applied-causal-graphs.de

You too! 🤜 🤛

In my experience there are no prizes for either. But maybe the ideal bet-hedging strategy is Claude Shannon's: ask a bunch of questions and then immediately answer them.

A perfectly good definition, but then the 'challenge' of asking a good question is a lot more like the challenge of "roll ten sixes in a row" (difficult because unlikely) and less like the challenge of "make ten free-throws in a row" (difficult because superior skill is required).

Could well be.

That retrospective quality though. It makes "the challenging thing is coming up with good questions" sound uncomfortably like "the challenging thing is to be born with the right parents" 🙃

Can't fault this answer.

I don't think I disagree. At least this focusses on what questions are actually for (and admits that the answer is not "to be answered correctly"). Still, I fear there's not a lot of operational guidance to be gleaned from knowing that good questions are ones that help discover truth.

More Papal Choice theory, with a special guest appearance by Ken Arrow himself.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei, Vox Sagittae on JSTOR
Forrest Maltzman, Melissa Schwartzberg, Lee Sigelman, Vox Populi, Vox Dei, Vox Sagittae, PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Apr., 2006), pp. 297-301
www.jstor.org

aha, a variety of

4. [barely suppressed excitement] this is one of the nine questions I prepared extra slides for.

Questions as a variably effective - a.k.a. variably good - tool for revealing (or offering) assumptions and forcing theory construction seems like a decently instrumental theory of questions to me, though it makes being a good question community-specific, retrospective, and unrelated to the answer.

That's kind of what I mean by 'out in the pragmatics'. When there's a shared understanding about what sorts of quantities are relevant to a topic then sure, you can pitch to adjust that set, but you have to do more than mention the other stuff, e.g. offer a theory that motivates now caring about it.

An off-the-cuff taxonomy of upstream reasons for 'great question'
0. omg I totally missed that (rare)
1. you have seen the thing that I am currently having trouble with (common)
2. you have reformulated the problem in a way that allows you to ask about something my formulation can't see (useful).

I'm increasingly thinking of this as, at best, metonymic in that the question itself has little directly to do with why I like a paper. In the same way as someone saying "that's a great question" is not usually commenting on the question, but on something far upstream of it, out in the pragmatics.

"The challenge is really coming up with good pictures"