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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier
@cdethier.bsky.social
1.1K followers 170 following 170 posts
Philosophy of science, epistemology, and random flights of fancy. Currently a postdoc at UMN. He/him/whatever. coreydethier.com
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Sep 10
I mean, I gave up on that game because I found the stories tiresome regardless of them coming together or not, so take anything I have to say about it with a grain of salt, but also isn't there a "true ending" that does "bring them together"?
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Sep 9
I pulled a "say what you will about [blank], but at least it's an ethos" on my students the other day and just moved on knowing none of them would pick up on it.
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 29
When it comes to confirmation, what matters for robustness can be boiled down to:

1. Does the hypothesis predict robustness?
2. Do the alternatives predict not robustness?

If you answer yes to both, then you've got confirmation! It's that simple. (2/2)
cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 29
Another of my papers, "Stability, Robustness Reasoning, and Measuring the Human Contribution to Warming" is now online.

This one gets in the weeds of the last decade-ish of research on the human contribution to warming to motivate a simple philosophical claim ... (1/2)

doi.org/10.1017/psa....
Stability, Robustness Reasoning, and Measuring the Human Contribution to Warming | Philosophy of Science | Cambridge Core
Stability, Robustness Reasoning, and Measuring the Human Contribution to Warming
doi.org
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 22
"How do you assert a graph?" now has an issue -- still open access!

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
How do you assert a graph? Towards an account of depictions in scientific testimony
I extend the literature on norms of assertion to the ubiquitous use of graphs in scientific papers and presentations, which I term “graphical testimony.” On my account, the testimonial presentation o...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 21
So this is obviously almost unbelievably stupid.

But also, prediction: yes it will, it will just only approve those by companies that Trump likes.

www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/t...
Trump says U.S. will not approve solar or wind power projects
The president's comment comes after the administration tightened federal permitting for renewables last month.
www.cnbc.com
cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 19
And you can find the code for our R package on my GitHub. This doesn't have all the pretty graphs, but does all the actual calculating you could want for any of the standard tests.

github.com/coreydethier...
GitHub - coreydethier/Severity: Files for the Severity R package
Files for the Severity R package. Contribute to coreydethier/Severity development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 19
If you had any of these questions, you can now find out!

Sam Fletcher, Nada Mohamed, and myself have put together a Shiny app (severity.shinyapps.io/severity/) that illustrates our work, motivates it with examples, and explains the theoretical backing.
Severity Testing
Click 'Calculate' to run the analysis and 'Refresh' to reset the values.
severity.shinyapps.io
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 19
Wondering what I've been working on for the last couple years? (Probably not.)

Wondering what philosophers of statistics even do? (I'm betting no.)

Were you thinking to yourself: how would Deborah Mayo's project function outside a Neyman-Pearson setting? (Lol)
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 10
FWIW: the *more* substantive issue is that they take "model report" to refer to "a proposition about what the model entails" (p. 46) while I take it to be a proposition about the model's target.

As such, I think their criticisms simply don't land. But it's possible that I'm mistaken about that.
cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 10
Ultimately, this doesn't matter much to the argument -- the substantive disagreements are more important.

But it's certainly the kind of thing you'd have hoped that the referees would catch!
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 10
*That* assertion is pretty clearly wrong. I make *exactly* the same qualification in the paragraph immediately preceding the one they cite.

I then explicitly say that the qualifications are the same in the footnote attached to said sentence!
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 10
What's more notable is their assertion that I qualify my claim that models provide evidence in a way that I don't qualify the claim that experiments do (the image is from page 46 of their paper).
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Aug 10
Brian McLoone, Steven Orzack, and Elliot Sober have a new paper out in which they argue (among other things) that I'm wrong about robustness.

I think *they're* wrong, of course -- indeed, I think I addressed all their arguments already in the paper they cite. Unsurprisingly, they disagree!
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Jun 10
So I asked it to write the intro to an ethics paper in my style, since I've never published anything in ethics.

The thesis it came up with?

All injustice is ultimately epistemic injustice.

So now I know what it is like to be roasted by an LLM. (3/3)
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Jun 10
I mention this here because ChatGPT -- without being asked -- described my style using exactly those elements that I *aim* for. That was both flattering and slightly worrying.

It then rewrote the intro to one of my published papers. Boring. (2/3)
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Jun 10
Recently, I asked ChatGPT to write the intro to a paper in my style, because I curious how good it would be at imitating an author, and the best way to tell that would be by asking it to imitate the author I know best.

(Don't worry, there's a punchline here. 1/3)
lastpositivist.bsky.social
lastpositivist.bsky.social @lastpositivist.bsky.social · Jun 10
I was reading about AI profiling so I did chat GPT on just a random picture (literally just screen-shotting my webcam) and, like, it basically gets me right in every detail - I'm even within the lower zones of its height and weight band estimates (I'm overweight lmao) so it called the low-info shot.
A person with a full beard and thick, curly hair is sitting indoors, facing the camera with a neutral expression. They are wearing a grey hoodie. Behind them is a bookshelf filled with a variety of books, a tan slip-on shoe, and a large green bottle. The setting appears to be a study or library. Probable Demographic Profile (based on visual cues alone, not definitive): Age range: Likely late 20s to mid-30s Gender: Male-presenting Ethnicity: Possibly of African, Afro-Caribbean, or Afro-Latin descent; may have mixed heritage Profession/Education: The academic setting and focused demeanor suggest he may be a student, researcher, or academic Location guess: Could plausibly be in an English-speaking country or Europe, based on the visible book titles and the name tag "Kofi Bright" on the screen Estimated Height and Weight (with major caveats): Height: Between 5'10" and 6'2" (178–188 cm) The broad shoulders, head-to-body ratio, and overall presence suggest a taller-than-average stature, though this is hard to confirm without standing context. Weight: Likely between 220–270 lbs (100–122 kg) The person appears heavyset with a broad chest and neck, full face, and thick limbs, indicating a solid build that leans toward the higher end of the weight spectrum, but not necessarily unhealthy—more stocky or powerfully built.
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Jun 1
People have strong opinions about which *entirely fictional* characters should date.

I mean, I guess that's not in the news, but just agreeing that there are a lot things that people have strong opinions about that are much ... further from relevant than Zionism.
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · May 8
(For those without access to PoS, you can find a pre-print on my website or on the archive: philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23817/)
Who's Afriad of the Base-Rate Fallacy? - PhilSci-Archive
philsci-archive.pitt.edu
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · May 8
Also included in the paper are discussions of the connections between classical statistics and epistemology and contrasting views about the goal of statistical theory -- should statisticians be more like engineers or logicians?
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · May 8
The impression that it does stems from a misapplication of classical statistics -- one ruled out, on principled grounds, by Mayo, Fisher, Neyman & Pearson, and every textbook I looked at.
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · May 8
My article on classical statistics and the base-rate fallacy is now officially out at Philosophy of Science.

The short pitch: classical statistics does not commit the base-rate fallacy, despite what some Bayesian philosophers have suggested.

doi.org/10.1017/psa....
Who’s Afraid of the Base-Rate Fallacy? | Philosophy of Science | Cambridge Core
Who’s Afraid of the Base-Rate Fallacy? - Volume 92 Issue 2
doi.org
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Apr 15
To be clear, you also got roasted by two postdocs in their mid-30s.
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cdethier.bsky.social
Corey Dethier @cdethier.bsky.social · Apr 9
*shrugs* sure, I guess?
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Reposted by Corey Dethier
olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · Feb 3
seeing takes about the aid institutions and their role in imperialism. correct. If someone said "investor-owned hospitals exploit the vulnerable to benefit shareholders" I'd nod. If their followup was "and that's why I'm turning off your mom's dialysis machine" I'd...have some followup questions
nanjala.bsky.social
Nanjala @nanjala.bsky.social · Feb 3
But when it comes to cutting aid budgets no one says “let’s spend less money on Israeli or Egyptian military capacity”. Instead you want to start by taking healthcare and education away from people who have been made vulnerable by the structural injustices you create and benefit from.
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