Vera Wilde
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verawil.de
Vera Wilde
@verawil.de
220 followers 300 following 350 posts
Scientist (PhD), writer, risk literacy and citizen science tool builder. Nerd-of-all-trades (research methodologist). <3 FOIA, babies, clocking bias and error. Seeker of truth, especially wild.
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verawil.de
57% of my pilot participants aced Bayesian stats problems. The lit's ceiling is 24%. Either I'm the greatest science educator alive, or everyone used LLMs.

Silver lining: my crappy data suggest a measure to estimate how contaminated your own crappy data are!

wildetruth.substack.com/p/lowered-ex...
February 9, 2026 at 10:04 AM
verawil.de
DAGs describe discrete snapshots. Most causal mechanisms of interest in science on humans and other living things operate continuously. The two may not correspond. Is it time to panic?

wildetruth.substack.com/p/can-we-bel...
February 4, 2026 at 11:13 AM
verawil.de
Anyone else notice the hot water seems to be out when you're too tired to take a shower
February 3, 2026 at 6:50 AM
verawil.de
Florence Nightingale invented the rose chart to show policy effects over time.

I made one for mass screenings for low-prevalence problems: verawilde.github.io/rarity-roulette/policy/

Watch false positives accumulate year after year while your "99% accurate" test remains worse than a coin flip!
January 30, 2026 at 1:12 PM
verawil.de
We baked a chocolate chestnut holiday cake from an AI recipe. It was dry, dull, and used too many em dashes.
January 7, 2026 at 9:36 AM
verawil.de
Hoppin' John on the table, wet paint on the rack.
Happy New Year! There's no goin' back.
January 1, 2026 at 6:53 PM
verawil.de
The holidays can be very hard for people whose lives don’t fit the postcard version.

If that’s you, too: you’re not alone. 🕯️
December 28, 2025 at 1:30 PM
verawil.de
Older child's ingenius gingerbread house. Candy-cane reflects AC. Blue candies are a moat. Yogurt raisins, a lemon orchard.
December 21, 2025 at 6:33 PM
verawil.de
Oh noed!
It hath snowed
on my freshly planted windowboxes.
November 24, 2025 at 10:40 AM
verawil.de
Five-year-old: "They're monster cookies...
"This one is in profile."
November 20, 2025 at 3:00 PM
verawil.de
Finally built a working version of the Rarity Roulette simulator! verawilde.github.io/rarity-roule...

It's an app to help visualize estimated hypothetical outcomes of mass screenings for low-prevalence problems.

More: wildetruth.substack.com/p/rarity-rou...

Would love feedback + feature requests.
November 18, 2025 at 10:54 AM
verawil.de
Pediatrician: Does your six month old say "baba"?

Me: My baby says "hi," "hey," "Mama," "I go," and ("Are you gonna go get your brother?") "I'm gonna"!
July 31, 2025 at 9:53 AM
verawil.de
Day 5 with my mother.
Please send help.
Chocolate, flame-throwers --
every bit helps.
July 15, 2025 at 2:38 PM
verawil.de
wildetruth.substack.com/p/you-say-to...

Frustrated with how iterated screening models often throw away info, I fell into a Bayesian search rabbit hole so you don't have to!

Spoiler: it means different things to different people, and multilevel modeling may make more sense.
June 26, 2025 at 12:42 PM
verawil.de
A lost bear -- found. A New Yorker article -- flawed. An endpoints rainbow for vaccines -- sketched. And a question about how to extend that to security and other rule-abidingness domains. (Or: Wait, what was the question?)

wildetruth.substack.com/p/the-bear-t...
June 23, 2025 at 12:12 PM
verawil.de
3/4 plants agree having a baby in January was survivable!
June 9, 2025 at 8:41 PM
verawil.de
Most frame abortion as life and death. Both sides prioritize different lives.

But what if the epistemic structure of the problem is that of a mass screening for a low-prevalence problem? That would mean we can estimate type I and type II errors.

wildetruth.substack.com/p/abortion-a...
May 27, 2025 at 11:56 AM
verawil.de
"These Are A Few of My Favorite Things"

That DAGs don't do: feedbacks, bias, private information, perverse incentives, moderation, and telling you where to cut the graph.

wildetruth.substack.com/p/these-are-...
Figure 1, Ragib Ahsan, David Arbour, and Elena Zheleva’s “Relational Causal Models with Cycles: Representation and Reasoning,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 140:1–18, 2022, 1st Conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning. Bernhard Schölkopf's "Causality for Machine Learning."
May 14, 2025 at 10:18 AM
verawil.de
MINE TOO!
May 9, 2025 at 2:13 PM
verawil.de
Well done, youngin. (When *I* was your age, OSF infrastructure to upload all your stuff was not yet online...)
May 9, 2025 at 11:32 AM
verawil.de
Look deeply into Bernhard Schölkopf's Table 1 taxonomy of models and tell me if I have to brush up on my 20+ year old college calculus in order to keep DAGging moar better.

arxiv.org/pdf/1911.10500
May 9, 2025 at 11:17 AM
verawil.de
May 2, 2025 at 1:42 PM
verawil.de
Vaccines are like drugs? Hit me. Part 1 of my review of Peter Gøtzsche's *Vaccines: Truth, Lies, and Controversy* -- what I learned and loved, and why I'm now raring to get more sticks.

wildetruth.substack.com/p/book-revie...
April 28, 2025 at 8:05 PM
verawil.de
Gotta say my favorite part of Brian Deer's *The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield's war on vaccines* was reading at the end that Wakefield was shacked up with supermodel Elle MacPherson, Googling it, and discovering that they broke up.

wildetruth.substack.com/p/book-revie...
April 26, 2025 at 8:30 PM
verawil.de
YES PLEASE (from the peanut gallery where I can't even get the text to display on the meme tonight).
April 24, 2025 at 8:01 PM