Sam Zhang
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samzhang.bsky.social
Sam Zhang
@samzhang.bsky.social
360 followers 160 following 29 posts
Assistant professor in statistics at the Vermont Complex Systems Institute || Formerly @ SFI, CU Boulder APPM || No longer on socials, send me an email instead || http://sam.zhang.fyi
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Reposted by Sam Zhang
kyleniemeyer.bsky.social
I'm excited to (belatedly) announce the two inaugural #URSSI Early Career Fellows, @matthewfeickert.com & @samzhang.bsky.social !

You can read more in our official post: urssi.us/blog/2025/04...

We'll be opening our next call for fellowship proposals in the coming months, keep an eye out!
URSSI Blog
urssi.us
April 28, 2025 at 5:39 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
danlarremore.bsky.social
An AI feature that I *actually* want in Zoom: when it sees you're about to sneeze, it auto-mutes you.

h/t @aaronclauset.bsky.social @nicklaberge.bsky.social @samzhang.bsky.social
January 22, 2025 at 9:44 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
dggoldst.bsky.social
By
Matt Hardy @mdahardy.bsky.social

Sam Zhang @samzhang.bsky.social

Jessica Hullman @jessicahullman.bsky.social

Jake Hofman jakehofman.com

Dan Goldstein @dggoldst.bsky.social
September 18, 2024 at 7:18 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
nicklaberge.bsky.social
1/ I’m excited to share our article "Gendered hiring and attrition on the path to parity for academic faculty" with Hunter Wapman @aaronclauset.bsky.social @danlarremore.bsky.social , now published @elife.bsky.social : elifesciences.org/articles/93755
July 19, 2024 at 5:04 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
mehr.nz
who did this
November 5, 2023 at 7:29 AM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Slides from my talk "Gender & Retention Patterns Among US Faculty" earlier this week @UMass ADVANCE, on our paper with the same name, led by @kspoon.bsky.social. What an amazing team at UMass, doing critical work to improve science and academia 👏
aaronclauset.github.io/slides/Claus...
slide title: "attrition over a career." shows data indicating that for "all-cause attrition", at every career age, women are more likely to leave than men slide title: "study design." highlights the survey portion of the study, intended to elicit the reasons faculty leave their jobs, noting that gendered reasons for leaving are more important than gendered rates of leaving slide title: "push & pull." shows data indicating that women feel pushed out of their academic jobs at substantially higher rates than men, and that gender+career age are the strongest predictors of whether a survey respondent reported feeling pushed out of their faculty job slide title: "conclusions." 1. women faculty universally leave academia at higher rates than men, but the rates vary in magnitude by domain and career age, mainly effecting tenured women, in non-STEM fields, at lower-prestige universities. but regardless of the rates, women leave for different, more worrisome reasons than men: they feel pushed out of their jobs. retention efforts have to focus on these reasons, not the rates
November 9, 2023 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
mjskay.com
I like this framing a lot, and use it in slides when describing the difference between these two types of uncertainty
A visualization of a Normal distribution with label "True (unknown) population" and a label pointing to the mean with the text "I want to estimate this" Same as previous, but with the addition of a row showing a sample of five draws from the population distribution, the mean, and its uncertainty Same as previous, but with several additional rows showing how the uncertainty in the mean becomes narrower as sample size goes up. Then, another column titled "Predictive uncertainty" showing the same population distribution with an arrow pointing to its density curve and the label "I want to predict this". Same as previous, but with additional rows in the "Predictive uncertainty" column showing that as the sample size goes up, the predictive uncertainty distribution does not get narrower, but it becomes a better approximation of the true population distribution.
November 8, 2023 at 1:22 AM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
carlbergstrom.com
I am delighted to announce that the Department of Biology at the University of Washington is advertising for a tenure-track assistant professor position on the quantitative understanding of collective behavior.

I will be chairing the search; details are here: apply.interfolio.com/130336
Snow geese fill the sky at sunset in Washington's Skagit Valley.
November 7, 2023 at 11:20 PM
samzhang.bsky.social
the real horror here is misspelling "correlation"...
quinnielin.bsky.social Quinn L. @quinnielin.bsky.social · Nov 1
Spotted this 🎃 while trick-or-treating with some friends and their kids in mid-Cambridge. The owner turned out to be an MIT professor for whom inferring causation from 📉😱correlation was the scariest thing any student could do. All the area parents are falling over themselves to prove they get it! 😂🖤
jack o’lantern carved with words “inferring causation from correlation” on porch
November 1, 2023 at 3:25 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
alexvont.bsky.social
My faves:
“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer” (not Plutarch; Die Hard)
“Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds of the sky” (not Charlemagne; Indiana Jones & the Holy Grail)
Ezekiel 25:17 doesn’t exist except in Pulp Fiction
October 29, 2023 at 3:57 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
valerueda.bsky.social
My recent paper in Economic Journal:
In the Econ job market men and women are recommended differently: letters for women stress hard work, those for men more likely highlight brilliance. This affects job placement.
Link to Paper: t.co/HUieaMuERd
With Giovanni Facchini and Markus Eberhardt
October 27, 2023 at 9:07 AM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
paulgp.com
Hard to top Florian’s thread:
October 25, 2023 at 4:22 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
edyong209.bsky.social
Phenomenal, wrenching essay by Hala Alyan.
Opinion | Why Must Palestinians Audition for Your Empathy?
The task of the Palestinian is to audition for empathy and compassion. To prove that we deserve it.
www.nytimes.com
October 25, 2023 at 5:06 PM
samzhang.bsky.social
🤔
Output of DALLE-3 with the following prompt: Illustration of a gigantic contraption, appearing almost like a creature, with multiple arms stretching out to grasp artworks and literature from heaps around it. These treasures are dropped into a big cauldron labeled 'AI Mixer'. As the vat stirs, the contents morph into a shimmering digital concoction. From the vat, hoses spray this concoction onto oversized canvases and printing machinery, creating puzzling and distorted results. Another group of machines then grabs these outputs, converting them into a different, more viscous digital substance.
October 24, 2023 at 11:56 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
aaronclauset.bsky.social
This 2019 Science Advances paper lives rent-free in my head, and I think it's the social science paper that I mention the most in everyday conversation with my peers or elders... #youths #olds #science
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
paper abstract "Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking" by Protzko and Schooler. it's a zinger!
October 24, 2023 at 4:29 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
psmaldino.bsky.social
Andrew Gelman reviewed my book, Modeling Social Behavior.

“The book has social science, it has code, it has graphs—it’s got everything… I hope it’s taught in thousands of classes and sells a zillion copies.”

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/10/24/m...
“Modeling Social Behavior”: Paul Smaldino’s cool new textbook on agent-based modeling | Stat...
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
October 24, 2023 at 3:05 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
carlbergstrom.com
Profoundly disappointing if true. Whether or not Michael's post was in good taste, he retweeted a mainstream satirical site to his personal social media account.

As an eLife editor I have no interest in monitoring my social media activity to ensure everything I post represents the journal.
I have been informed that I am being replaced as the Editor in Chief of @eLife for retweeting a @TheOnion piece that calls out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians.
October 23, 2023 at 11:52 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
kspoon.bsky.social
1/ New paper! “Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty” w/ N Laberge KH Wapman @samzhang AC Morgan M Galesic BK Fosdick @danlarremore @aaronclauset: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
A systematic study of gendered rates & reasons for faculty attrition in US academia 🧵
October 20, 2023 at 6:36 PM
samzhang.bsky.social
For those of you near Burlington, VT, I'll be giving a talk about this paper (and another recent preprint) at the STAT@UVM colloquium today! site.uvm.edu/statatuvm/se...
October 16, 2023 at 3:45 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
edyong209.bsky.social
An incredible essay by Arielle Angel, EIC of Jewish Currents: jewishcurrents.org/we-cannot-cr...
“We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other”
The editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents on recommitting to our movements in this moment.
jewishcurrents.org
October 13, 2023 at 7:48 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
alisabokulich.bsky.social
"246 biologists get different results from same data sets.
Wide distribution of findings shows how analytical choices drive conclusions."
#philsci 🌍 #evobio

www.nature.com/articles/d41...
October 15, 2023 at 10:08 AM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
aaronclauset.bsky.social
Strong endorse here: There is no measurement, no summary statistics, no statistical tests, and no descriptive analyses without underlying theories & models. A powerful skill to develop as a scientist is to become conscious of the unstated theories that are being used in this or that scholarship.
devezer.bsky.social Berna Devezer @devezer.bsky.social · Oct 13
It's a mistake to think that inference is supposed to be exclusively a function of data. That's not what science is about. That's not the point of doing research. But we definitely should be talking more about scientific theories and models.
psycnet.apa.org/record/2023-...
psycnet.apa.org
October 15, 2023 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
davidklion.bsky.social
For @nplusonemag.bsky.social, I wrote about how we're living through the post-9/11 period all over again, in all the worst ways
Have We Learned Nothing? | David Klion
There’s a pervasive censoriousness right now—conservatives denouncing liberals, liberals denouncing leftists, leftists denouncing other leftists—that’s immediately familiar from the days and w...
www.nplusonemag.com
October 11, 2023 at 9:57 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
carlbergstrom.com
Show any academic this graph and they'll immediately note that the tenure packet is due not longer after the peak.

@samzhang.bsky.social, @danlarremore.bsky.social, @aaronclauset.bsky.social, and colleagues provide a more nuanced explanation in their new preprint:
arxiv.org/abs/2309.04414
Mean annual academic productivity (papers) peaks around 4 years into the academic career.
October 10, 2023 at 10:49 PM
Reposted by Sam Zhang
carlbergstrom.com
Befriending crows is a wonderful thing.

Robert Frost knew.

"The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued."

So often my crow friends have saved a day ruined by work or otherwise. (2/n)
August 20, 2023 at 2:01 AM