Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

Jessica writes:

I get so tired of people dumping on decision theory because real world decisions are complex. If decision theory is so deeply flawed, I’d love to know what alternative methods the critics advise for trying to evaluate and improve decision making in some real world setting. Should we give up on modeling completely because some cause problems for our assu...

Donna Spiegelman shares this presentation she gave at the recent American Causal Inference Conference. I like what she has to say.

Here are the two parts of the stable treatment value assumption:

A year and a day ago, the Survey Statistics blog series launched with: “it is the people that make make survey statistics (and anything) great”. This past weekend, we got to celebrate wonderful people at

Palko points to this breakdown of a junk news story. The fake-survey-to-headline pipeline reminds me of a credulous Wall Street Journal story from

I was thinking more about Noem’s Razor (“Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice”) and it reminded me of that “Unintended consequences” often were actually intended, a principle that I