A big problem in our community

Like Pierre, after reading Kristian’s courageous wake-up call, I was thinking of waiting a few days before blogging on the fundamental problem this harrowing story of hers exposes, while moving to actively make ISBA safe, along with Kerrie Mengersen and other members, especially j-ISBA. So in the meanwhile, here is Pierre’s blog entry that I completely endorse, with an additional feeling of failed responsibility as a senior man and president of ISBA:

Statisfaction

“Tout va très bien”, meaning “all is well”, by Franquin.

Hi all,

Kristian Lum, who was already one of my Statistics superheroes for hermanyinterestingpapers and great talks, bravely wrote the following text about her experience as a young statistician going to conferences:

https://medium.com/@kristianlum/statistics-we-have-a-problem-304638dc5de5

I can’t thank Kristian enough for speaking out. Her experience is both shocking and hardly surprising. Many, many academics report similar stories. This simply can’t go on like that.

I happen to have gone to the conferences mentioned by Kristian, and my experience as a young man was completely different. It was all about meeting interesting people, discussing ideas, being challenged, and having good times. Nobody harassed, touched or assaulted me. There was some flirting, as I guess is natural when hundreds of people are put in sunny places far away from home, but I was never the victim of any misconduct or…

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ISBA 2016 [#3]

Among the sessions I attended yesterday, I really liked the one on robustness and model mispecification. Especially the talk by Steve McEachern on Bayesian inference based on insufficient statistics, with a striking graph of the degradation of the Bayes factor as the prior variance increases. I sadly had no time to grab a picture of the graph, which compared this poor performance against a stable rendering when using a proper summary statistic. It clearly relates to our work on ABC model choice, as well as to my worries about the Bayes factor, so this explains why I am quite excited about this notion of restricted inference. In this session, Chris Holmes also summarised his two recent papers on loss-based inference, which I discussed here in a few posts, including the Statistical Science discussion Judith and I wrote recently. I also went to the j-ISBA [section] session which was sadly under-attended, maybe due to too many parallel sessions, maybe due to the lack of unifying statistical theme.

BAYSM ’14 im Wien, Sep. 18-19

It all started in Jim Berger’s basement, drinking with the uttermost reverence an otherworldly Turley Zinfandel during the great party Ann and Jim Berger hosted for the O’Bayes’13 workshop in Duke. I then mentioned to Angela Bitto and Alexandra Posekany, from WU Wien, that I was going to be in Austria next September for a seminar in Linz, at the Johannes Kepler Universität, and, as it happened to take place the day before BAYSM ’14, the second conference of the young Bayesian statisticians, in connection with the j-ISBA section, they most kindly invited me to the meeting! As a senior Bayesian, most obviously! This is quite exciting, all the more because I never visited Vienna before. (Contrary to other parts of Austria, like the Großglockner, where I briefly met Peter Habeler. Trivia: the cover picture of the ‘Og is actually taken from the Großglockner.)

MCMSki 4, 5… [rejuvenating suggestion]

Another thing I should have included in the program. Or in the organising committee: a link with the Young Bayesians (j-ISBA) section… As pointed out to me by Kerrie Mengersen, ISBA meetings are obvious opportunities for young researchers to interact and network, as well as for seeking a job. Thus, there should be time slots dedicated to them in every ISBA sponsored meeting, from a mixer on the very first day to a job market coffee break the next day (and to any other social activity bound to increase the interactivity. Like a ski race.). So I would suggest every ISBA sponsored event (and no only the Bayesian Young Statistician Meetings!) should include a j-ISBA representative in its committee(s) to enforce this policy… (Kerrie also suggested random permutations during the banquet which is a neat idea provided the restaurant structure allows for this. It would have been total chaos in La Calèche last week!)