Borysław Paulewicz
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boryslaw.bsky.social
Borysław Paulewicz
@boryslaw.bsky.social
Intro to causal inference for psychologists:
https://czasopisma.uwm.edu.pl/index.php/pp/article/view/9731/7171
A causal-theoretic definition of measurement invariance (see p. 14):
+
A new ordinal regression family
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/e7a3x
"gold standard" = this is what researchers, most of whom cannot understand the rationale behind this method because of math illiteracy, tend to do

"to disentangle" = to entangle
December 11, 2025 at 12:09 PM
"X, Y, and Z have shown that V" = X, Y, and Z were almost certainly mistaken by claiming that V in any plausible way follows from their results (that may or may not replicate), but they hid it well enough to publish the paper
...
December 11, 2025 at 12:09 PM
"M measures T" = there are, often unspecified, reasons to believe that M is in some way, about which we know next to nothing, related to T

"could mean that X" = no one knows what this tells us about X
...
December 11, 2025 at 12:09 PM
And we often think we are smart only because we vaguely remember what those whom we perceive as smart have said :-)
December 9, 2025 at 8:27 AM
That's cool. Could it also be that when they pursue long-term goals the goals are highly unrealistic, dream-like even, because otherwise, they do not feel the subjective value of delayed rewards strongly enough?
November 21, 2025 at 1:11 PM
... This latter statement can be viewed to refer to an *asymptotic* property of the CI viewed as a *decision rule* as long as the critically important "in such cases" part is interpreted as capturing the hypothetical infinite process of making claims by a hypothetical (& immortal) sampling agent.
November 19, 2025 at 8:37 AM
... We cannot say:

"the true value is in the CIs with probability 9%"

but we can say:

"the statement 'the true value is in the CIs' is true with probability 95% *in such cases*" ...
November 19, 2025 at 8:37 AM
... it is not something we can just express in a formal language. One can view the strange tension between how we want to view the CIs and what we can say about the CIs as long as we stick to the technical language as a special case of this. In particular: ...
November 19, 2025 at 8:37 AM
... I say *the agent doing the reasoning is the golem* (!). Not only should we not believe in the statistical models we use, we also *cannot* know if a prior distribution captures our uncertainty because our *actual* uncertainty is a *mystery we can only attempt to study* (by reasoning about it);..
November 19, 2025 at 8:37 AM
... about a hypothetical agent doing the reasoning in a hypothetical (and extremely simple) world. That's because we know that the model is an (extreme) idealization. @rmcelreath.bsky.social coined the great term "golem" to emphasize this aspect of statistical inference; ...
November 19, 2025 at 8:37 AM
I knew we were on the same page, so I hadn't read the blog post before, but now that I did (which was fun!), I would like to share the thoughts it inspired: One can think of all forms of statistical inference as an exercise in *meta*-reasoning since statistical inference is virtually always ...
November 19, 2025 at 8:37 AM
Reposted by Borysław Paulewicz
Universal first-name basis is a great and wondrous gift that the Nordics are offering to the world, that we've been impatiently waiting for like half a century for them to pick up.
November 16, 2025 at 10:22 AM
It was fun, thanks!
November 15, 2025 at 2:10 PM
You would have to do much more to connect what I am saying to some notion of truth. Being a product of behavior is logically independent from being a sentence, let alone a true sentence. And yes, psychology is the only science that studies itself. Because it is the fundamental science.
November 15, 2025 at 2:05 PM