Andres Montealegre

[133] Heterofriendly: The Intuition for Why You Always Need Robust Standard Errors - Data Colada When I taught my first PhD-level methods course, I invited students to submit questions about any topic in statistics or methodology. Six out of 10 students asked about the same topic: robust & cluste...

Answering the most popular question in a PhD methods course
datacolada.org/133

Willie Colón, salsa pioneer, has died at 75 The South Bronx bandleader took the Latin genre to new heights while recording for Fania Records.

The South Bronx bandleader took the Latin genre to new heights while recording for Fania Records. n.pr/4kLTCKV

late to the party, but congrats, Felix!

PIano being dropped on car in car testing facility

Would p-curve work if you dropped a piano on it?
datacolada.org/129

Completely agree. Averages can hide weird patterns. We make a related point about stimuli in psych experiments and propose a visualization here: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... (or datacolada.org/126 for a summary)

Colada[128] The Best Audit Study and its interesting shortcoming
datacolada.org/128

The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality The Effect: An Introduction to Research Design and Causality, Second edition is an excellent teaching text about research design, specifically concerning research that uses observational data to make ...

The second edition of The Effect has been delayed a bit... because there were so many orders they had to switch to a bigger print run! Thank you everyone for your support, and check out the second edition here: www.routledge.com/The-Effect-A...

Thank you!!

Completely agree!

In those cases, it can feel like the kind thing to do is to either not mention them at all or to soften them so much that they become obscured. And that’s where I think there is an inevitable tension between kindness and truth-seeking
…

I largely agree with this, and I think it’s something that some critically minded people tend to underweigh. The biggest challenge in practice, I think, is that certain criticisms-no matter how carefully you frame them-will still be perceived as unkind
…

Don't assume, plot
datacolada.org/126

Same (except with base r). I find it quite enjoyable, and it has made me more fastidious with figures.

It could work. I'm particularly interested in confounds and causal identification, because so called 'conservative confounds' could create other unintended problems. But my concern might apply to this as well.

Interesting, I was thinking about this in the context of causal identification rather than statistical significance. I was curious about counterarguments like "what seems like a 'conservative confound' that goes against the observed effect may actually change how the other mechanisms work."

thanks!

Does anybody know of a paper or blog discussing arguments of the form "we found our results despite this confound that works against our effect"? Essentially, how to think about confounds that go against the hypothesized or observed effect.

Thinking Clearly with Data An engaging introduction to data science that emphasizes critical thinking over statistical techniques

Parts of this book would probably work: press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Really proud of this new work out @psychscience.bsky.social. Led by the amazing but bluesky-less Amanda Geiser and with @deborahsmall.bsky.social.

We show that when comparing moral wrongs, people are (much) more willing to “scale up” than to “scale down” condemnation and punishment…

Measurement error, Nobel Prize winning research, friendly disagreements, and more....
datacolada.org/124

🏆 Research integrity consultant and image forensics expert @elisabethbik.bsky.social has uncovered fraudulent data in over 7,600 scientific papers and exposed the practices of ‘paper mills’ that produce counterfeit scientific articles. She is honoured with the €200K Individual Award. Congrats!

Roy Ayers, whose 'Everybody Loves The Sunshine' charmed generations, dies at 84 The vibraphonist, composer and jazz-funk pioneer helped inspire the neo-soul movement, and his best-known song was sampled over 100 times.

The vibraphonist, composer and jazz-funk pioneer helped inspire the neo-soul movement, and his best-known song was sampled over 100 times.

[123] Dear Political Scientists: The binning estimator violates ceteris paribus - Data Colada This post delves into a disagreement I have with three prominent political scientists, Jens Hainmueller, Jonathan Mummolo, and Yiqing Xu (HMX), on a fundamental methodological question: how to analyze...

Delving into a disagreement with prominent political scientists on a fundamental data-analysis question: what do you want to learn from a regression interaction?
datacolada.org/123

The prophet of parking A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup

Today in @worksinprogress.bsky.social, I reflect on Donald Shoup's legacy. Perhaps the most interesting question: how did the most unlikely professor kick off an international parking reform movement?
substack.com/home/post/p-...

Data Organization in Spreadsheets Spreadsheets are widely used software tools for data entry, storage, analysis, and visualization. Focusing on the data entry and storage aspects, this article offers practical recommendations for o...

How to use excel safely to avoid errors: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Title Authors Abstract (Decision under Risk are Decisions Under Complexity: Comment)

A new working paper with Daniel Banki, @urisohn.bsky.social and Robert Walatka, just submitted to SSRN.

The paper is comment on Ryan Oprea's recent AER paper.

The paper is processing, but you, my friends, get early entry.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Alcohol and Health Cutting through the noise

Yeah, I have a different read of the evidence that aligns more with this (parentdata.org/alcohol-and-...) and hence why I find the causality statement too strong. But we can agree to disagree. Thanks for engaging.

Thanks! Though given the absence of causal evidence in humans, I’m not sure I would refer to this as causal. The key issue of what level of dosage is harmful in humans is particularly hard to learn from observational studies.

What is the best available evidence that alcohol *causes* cancer? So far the evidence I have seen comes from observational studies