Dan Major-Smith
djsmith90.bsky.social
Dan Major-Smith
@djsmith90.bsky.social
Recovering Evolutionary Anthropologist/Accidental Epidemiologist/Cat fosterer

PostDoc at Aarhus and Senior Research Associate at Bristol

Interests: cooperation; religion; causal inference; cohort studies

Site: https://danmajor-smith.netlify.app/about
Our experience at @pci-regreports.bsky.social was great - Really helpful and collaborative reviews and editors, made for a refreshing change from the usual grind of the academic review/publishing process!

If any folks are PCI-curious, would totally recommend! 😊
June 10, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Caveat 2) We measured climate *concern*, not climate *anxiety*. It's possible that reactions to the climate crisis which are more extreme than mere 'concern' have an impact on mental health - We simply can't infer anything about this from our paper
June 10, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Many caveats though (ofc!)

1) Just because we *tried* to estimate a causal effect, doesn't mean we *succeed*. Our causal estimand was our target, but our aim may have been terrible, but we at least tried to be open about these issues (unmeasured confounding, selection bias, measurement error, etc.)
June 10, 2025 at 2:07 PM
What did we find? Pretty much nada!

In this UK population of young adults (~30 years old) there was essentially no relationship between climate concern and subsequent mental health/well-being
June 10, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Using the wonderful longitudinal ALSPAC data, we tried to answer whether concern over climate change causes subsequent mental health.

Lots of previous work has looked at climate anxiety/concern and mental health, but most is X-sectional, so is almost impossible to learn anything about causality
June 10, 2025 at 2:07 PM
As a side note, even if you don't give a hoot about free-list data, check out the paper for the sweet use of LaTeX - Looks pretty legit, right? (What are we paying journals the big bucks for again...?)
April 9, 2025 at 8:16 AM
The paper includes code to play around with these different methods, with more juicy deets and extras in the companion code: github.com/djsmith-90/F...

(We'll also be updating the @anthrotools.bsky.social package with these methods, so stay tuned!)
GitHub - djsmith-90/FreeListUncertainty_CompanionCode: Companion code and data for 'Modelling uncertainty around free-list cultural salience scores' paper.
Companion code and data for 'Modelling uncertainty around free-list cultural salience scores' paper. - djsmith-90/FreeListUncertainty_CompanionCode
github.com
April 9, 2025 at 8:16 AM
We focus on salience scores, starting simple with bootstrapping methods, followed by more principled/bad-ass Bayesian ZOIB and ordered Beta models (they sound scary, but are super-cool).

This approach can be also applied to other free-list metrics as well (Jaccard's similarity, cultural FST, etc).
April 9, 2025 at 8:16 AM
Yeah, I'd reckon probably somewhere around there, or a bit to the left with the 'society' journals - technically AAAS is non-profit, and it doesn't act as much like a commercial publisher than CUP and OUP.
October 4, 2024 at 3:12 PM
Ace, thanks Pat!

And very cool (I mean, depressing as hell, but still very cool) - Thanks for sharing 😅
October 4, 2024 at 1:18 PM
Alas, I agree with @drbeth.bsky.social that it's still super-common (eg, anecdotes about hiring decisions made on having a Nature/Science/Whatever paper)... Hopefully will start changing more soon though! 🤞

V. interested to know what you find if you do a deep-dive into this 🙂
October 4, 2024 at 11:58 AM