In a similar low-fantasy procedural vein there's "The Witness for the Dead" and "The Grief of Stones" by Katherine Addison. Set in the same world as my favorite political thriller, "The Goblin Emperor"

Obsidian and Blood series by Aliette de Bodard: police procedural set in pre-contact Tenochtitlan where the investigator is the High Priest for the Dead, and has to deal with both murder and overly interested gods

The nth generation of species inventing paleontology would be increasingly confused by the horizons of acrylics in the rock record.

Then their chemists invented their own plastics and they suddenly got scared

I hope it comes with a little toga you can pull over it's head

Similar energy here

That makes sense. Also, probably not worth the effort to improve estimates of "average belief" anyway: as you noted in the post the estimand likely doesn't exist.

Before today I doubt that I had a number in my mind for "fraction of people who own guns", so I'd have to estimate it at survey time

I also wonder about incentives for YouGov here: I would guess it would look better if they reported median rather than mean responses at least for correcting for random answers, but "people think 10% of all people are trans" would likely get many fewer headlines

Thanks for writing this! Adding this to my intro stats reading list.

Is there any work looking at whether people are better at estimating proportions when asked about concrete frequencies (e.g. "how many Americans out of 100 Americans own a car?".

Seems related to this:
doi.org/10.1016/0010...

I've played mycelia once and enjoyed it. It does feel like you're playing as a fungus in a forest community. I found its strategy a bit hard to get on first play, though, and it's definitely a "crunchy" game

Undergrove is fantastic: you play as Douglas Fir trees trading resources with fungi to grow seedlings. By the same designer as Wingspan, and both very fun to play and incredibly well-researched

I keep meaning to learn targets, but it's just complex enough that I end up doing things like the hash trick because I'm short on time for a given project

In one recent project I ended up with a function that checks the hash of the data, the simulation file, and the saved output, then only reran the costly sims if the calculated hashes didn't match the ones in the saved sim file.

Do not ask what lengths I'll go to to avoid relearning make files

Of course, Icarus is the OG failson

(important disclaimer: I don't hold any special knowledge or expertise in Cree stories, that's just my impression from reading English language versions of some of them)

Although you could see Weesageechak as a war god who is also occasionally a bumbling idiot for comedic effect

A lot of trickster stories from many cultures have that kind of vibe for some of the stories, but the trickster is generally never depicted as a bumbling idiot across multiple stories

Inspired by @kjhealy.co's post on "Life at low Reynolds number" and a recent discussion with Jeremy Fox on the Dynamic Ecology blog
dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/t...

From what I recall from the class I took on Hazard models: the issue with just adding a time-varying hazard rate in a PH model is that you are breaking the proportionate hazards assumption; the Poisson trick set things up to break the data into blocks within which the PH assumption could be valid

I see your point; however, I don't think there's a conceptual difference between the two cases: internally, a basis function that changes value over time just looks like a time-varying coefficient. I think the same approaches should work for both (breaking time into intervals between events)