Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
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Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
@mattansb.msbstats.info
3.2K followers 330 following 1.4K posts
Statistics lecturer | Freelance statistical consultant & research analyst | #rstats dev @easystats.github.io

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Mattan S. Ben-Shachar @mattansb.msbstats.info · Oct 26
1k followers! Calls for a re-introduction:

Statistics lecturer, freelance stats consultant, & #rstats dev @easystats.bsky.social 📊

I try to help social scientists make better inferences from their data & communicate their findings 👨‍🏫

Hope to bring the #stats twitter/R community vibes over to bsky!
mattansb.msbstats.info
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December 21, 2025 at 4:18 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
jbakcoleman.bsky.social
Here's one paper on that, in the context of hiring but you could almost copy and paste peer review. There are, of course other concerns like LLMs forcing science back towards the training data vs. outwards towards brand new understandings.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
www.pnas.org
December 20, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
economeager.bsky.social
life is so bad when you have a tea-making apparatus that sucks. everything turns for the good when you have a tea-making apparatus that is good.
December 20, 2025 at 11:13 AM
mattansb.msbstats.info
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Please, no more fried food.
Okay, maybe one more sfenj 🤤
December 19, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
pengzell.bsky.social
All research is exploratory if you’re confused enough
December 19, 2025 at 8:01 AM
mattansb.msbstats.info
Julia guest spoke at our Psych department's weekly seminar yesterday (I guess that was her second-to-last talk then?) about causal inference, DAGs and all the beautiful things in between.

I think some minds were blown - which was my intention all along! 😈

Slides:
juliarohrer.com/wp-content/u...
dingdingpeng.the100.ci Julia M. Rohrer @dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 8d
Just gave my last talk of the year!

2025 was quite packed, I gave talks about:
- the age-period-cohort problem
- making rigorous causal inference more mainstream
- mediation analysis
- marginaleffects
- causal graphs (x10)

If you're curious, check out my slides here: juliarohrer.com/resources/
Resources
Here you can find a collection of things that may be helpful, including slide decks, a curated list of introductory papers and blog posts, as well as some infographics I have generated to explain v…
juliarohrer.com
December 18, 2025 at 1:29 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
ddgutierrez.bsky.social
Students often assume that models create insight.
I remind them: models compress what you already understand. If you don’t understand the domain, the model won’t rescue you. Assumptions come first.

#AI #DataScience #MachineLearning #RStats
December 18, 2025 at 1:49 AM
mattansb.msbstats.info
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Now with latkas! 🤤
December 17, 2025 at 4:34 PM
mattansb.msbstats.info
One place I never imagined "not being a sports guy" would catch up with me is grading papers...
About half the projects in my data science course are about the NBA, and I find myself with Wikipedia ope - trying to make sense of the analyses the students are describing, and... just... 😮‍💨
December 16, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
idoshal.bsky.social
New preprint 🎉 Psych constructs are complex. Symptoms overlap, people rarely fit neat categories, and patterns are non-linear. Most methods compromise this richness. Self-Organising Maps don't. We provide a step-by-step tutorial with annotated R code to make them accessible.

doi.org/10.31234/osf...
December 16, 2025 at 5:19 PM
mattansb.msbstats.info
Happy holidays!

A Menora is really just a Hanukkah progress bar:
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December 16, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
andrew.heiss.phd
Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things
December 15, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
cedricscherer.com
I ignored the strip.clip argument in #ggplot2 for way too long 😲

Combined with a small negative margin tweak, you can place facet labels inside each panel. A tiny trick that makes small multiples feel so much cleaner.

🔵 no manual coordinates
🔵 inherits theme styling
🔵 scales nicely when resizing
Side-by-side comparison of two multi-panel bubble charts faceted by world region. The left column shows the default facet labels placed above each panel (“Africa”, “Americas”, “Asia”, “Europe”, “Oceania”). The right column shows the same charts, but the facet labels are moved inside each panel at the top-left using a negative margin. In the center, there is a title reading “Want to place your facet labels inside each panel?” with an arrow pointing right, followed by a short ggplot2 theme code snippet demonstrating how to move strip text inside the panel.
December 12, 2025 at 12:51 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
Seven-parameter drift-diffusion pdfs and cdfs now in Stan
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/12/11/s...
Seven-parameter drift-diffusion pdfs and cdfs now in Stan | Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
December 11, 2025 at 9:00 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
idoshal.bsky.social
Empathic disequilibrium could change the way we think about empathy and help recognise and accept diverse empathic experiences, moving us beyond the usual “low” or “high” empathy narrative. #Neurodiversity #Autism #Empathy

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
December 12, 2025 at 7:45 AM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
datavisfriendly.bsky.social
#rstats Wondering about the status of a package you submitted to CRAN? Worried that some reply went into your spam folder? There's a CRANSAYS dashboard for that

r-hub.github.io/cransays/art...
CRAN incoming dashboard
r-hub.github.io
December 11, 2025 at 11:43 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
andrew.heiss.phd
Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...
Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code. In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle. This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything. You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.
December 9, 2025 at 8:17 PM
mattansb.msbstats.info
Every time I do this, I feel like a pervert.

mat_list <- matrix(list(), nrow =..., ncol = ...)

#rstats
December 10, 2025 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
kellybodwin.com
%notin% is coming to Base R! Heck to the yes.

We are truly blessed on this day, thank you R Core. 🤩

#rstats
Screenshot of an item in the new R-devel release, that says: x %notin% table newly in base is an idiom for !(x %in% table) and provided almost entirely for convenience and code readability, from an R-devel suggestion, after many years of private definitions mostly hidden in packages, including in R's tools package.
December 9, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
danlewer.bsky.social
?untidy (after loading emmeans) "Dare to be un-tidy! ... Statistical analysis is not just a workflow; it is a discipline" #rstats
December 9, 2025 at 12:28 PM
mattansb.msbstats.info
Someone please make "responsibility analysis" a thing!
tomstewart80.bsky.social Tom Stewart @tomstewart80.bsky.social · 18d
Power analysis. No responsibility analysis. Only power analysis.
December 9, 2025 at 2:16 PM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
tomstewart80.bsky.social
Power analysis. No responsibility analysis. Only power analysis.
December 9, 2025 at 8:08 AM
Reposted by Mattan S. Ben-Shachar
p-hunermund.com
Really? What if people decide to have children exactly at the moment when they anticipate their sleep satisfaction to decline? 😜
December 9, 2025 at 10:15 AM
mattansb.msbstats.info
The interesting thing about the Table 2 Fallacy is that it works even if you're only looking at regression as a prediction model: standardized coefficients (betas) aren't equal to semi-partial correlations.

#stats
December 8, 2025 at 7:54 PM