Yann de Mey

So “*in a world where there is really no effect*, the result would be produced by chance less than 5% of the time” is correct; but without adding that first part lord Bayes would like to have a word. In context: “*in a world where smoking bans actually do not work*” (2/2)

However, one significant comment: your layman’s definition of a p-value perpetuate a statistical misconception 🙃 it is crucial to add that it is a probability under the null hypothesis, and not in general (1/2)

Don't hate the replicator, hate the game Podcast Episode · Planet Money · 27 February · 36m

@planetmoney.bsky.social I love the latest episode on Replication games!! Definitely a most listen for any scientist podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/p...

Final days to apply!

Gemini even shamed me for allegedly referring to a past labelling incident (I was not) and then shamed me into suffering from Apophenia before admitting the data was fake =) bsky.app/profile/yann...

People of Business Economics Meet the people of this Chair Group.

More information about our group can be found here: www.wur.nl/en/chair-gro...

Assistant Professor Economic Modelling of Farms and Firms in Food Supply Chains Do you want to support economic decision making and sustainable transitions in food supply chains? Do you have a passion for teaching empirical modelling of farms and firms in food supply chains? Then...

We are hiring at the Assistant Professor level! The position is open to anyone with a quantitative agri-business research and teaching profile. Feel free to reach out if you have questions 🙏
www.wur.nl/en/vacancy/a...

Another banger by Paolo Crosetto, Pablo Gómez Barreiro, and Mark Austin Hanson! While special issues with guest editors are not a problem in themselves, journals that build a business model around then invites people to start gaming the system...

Very grateful to have received this ERAE Reviewer certificate. But I am passing this on to @khoavuumn.bsky.social in recognition of his unique commitment to our profession. Should have been his in the first place.

And now a podcast segment is out on the Food for Europe podcast frol the EU: podcasts.apple.com/be/podcast/f...

Economics programme in shock after sudden cancellation of English-taught track The Bachelor's programme in Economics & Business Economics will only be offered in Dutch from 2029 onwards, the Executive Board announced on Tuesday. The news came as a complete surprise to the econom...

Utrecht University abolishes its English language bachelor's program in economics and replaces it with a Dutch one.

They told staff (~30% international) the week before Christmas. Layoffs seem likely now. Unwarranted lobotomy is the only word I can find for it...

dub.uu.nl/en/news/econ...

A more general overview of the farmers' protests across Europe can be found (open access) in:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Farmers’ Voices in European Protests: Diverse Complaints, Emotional Tones, and Policy Responses The 2024 farmers’ protests across Europe signaled widespread dissatisfaction in the agricultural sector. While low farm incomes and restrictive enviro…

The full paper can be openly read here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti.... #farmer #protests #Brussels

“Policy dissatisfaction” and “Unfair market conditions”, were highly mentioned as protest reasons across Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The paper further focuses on farmers’ own stated grievances and how EU/national policy reactions aligned or failed to align with them.

In our recent Food Policy article, we examined farmers’ own stated grievances during last year’s protests across four EU countries and how governments responded. Our findings suggested that unresolved and misaligned policy responses would likely contribute to repeated escalation.

The renewed farmers’ protests today highlight the persistence of European agricultural policy tensions. Condemning the associated violence and destructive actions is necessary. At the same time, preventing its recurrence requires understanding why farmers mobilize in the first place.

LinkedIn style would be: "Comment MOAR below and I will share the code via DM"

EU Agri-Food Days 3rd edition of the EU Agri-Food Days from 15 - 17 December 2025 in Brussels with the theme of Securing Europe’s Food and Agriculture. The platform for dialogue between EU agri-food system stakeholders...

You can still join Day 3 online: agriculture.ec.europa.eu/eu-agri-food...

#EUAgriFoodDays #Brussels #EuropeanComission #Agriculture #farming #risk #riskmanagement #resilience

Finally, while President von der Leyen highlighted that the CAP aims to provide stability, I highlighted that in my research farmers consistently perceive *policy uncertainty* as a major source of risk. A stable policy framework is therefore essential in my view!

While traditional risk management focuses mainly on robustness to known risks, resilience thinking offers a broader perspective: preventing risks where possible, enabling adaptation, and even allowing for long-term transformation in the face of both known and unknown challenges.

This puts pressure on:
• Farmers dealing with “everyday” on-farm risks
• Markets handling rarer risks with big consequences
• Governments stepping in when risks become catastrophic

My main point was: risk has *always* been part of farming, but today’s risk landscape is changing fast. Risks increasingly interact and compound, and co-occur with big shocks like COVID-19 or the war in Ukraine.

It was amazing to take part in the 🌽 EU Agri-Food Days 🧑‍🌾 at the European Commission as a panelist in the policy session on "Building a resilient agri-food sector".

Will you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course in the future? No. Why won’t you incorporate LLMs and AI prompting into the course? These tools are useful for coding (see this for my personal take on this). However, they’re only useful if you know what you’re doing first. If you skip the learning-the-process-of-writing-code step and just copy/paste output from ChatGPT, you will not learn. You cannot learn. You cannot improve. You will not understand the code.

In that post, it warns that you cannot use it as a beginner: …to use Databot effectively and safely, you still need the skills of a data scientist: background and domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability. There is no LLM-based shortcut to those skills. You cannot LLM your way into domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, or coding ability. The only way to gain domain knowledge, data analysis expertise, and coding ability is to struggle. To get errors. To google those errors. To look over the documentation. To copy/paste your own code and adapt it for different purposes. To explore messy datasets. To struggle to clean those datasets. To spend an hour looking for a missing comma. This isn’t a form of programming hazing, like “I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow and now you must too.” It’s the actual process of learning and growing and developing and improving. You’ve gotta struggle.

This Tumblr post puts it well (it’s about art specifically, but it applies to coding and data analysis too): Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner’s roadblock to art isn’t even technical skill it’s frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach’s capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That’s how you build on the technical skill. Throw that “won’t even start because I’m afraid it won’t be perfect” shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck. (The original post has disappeared, but here’s a reblog.) It’s hard, but struggling is the only way to learn anything.

You might not enjoy code as much as Williams does (or I do), but there’s still value in maintaining codings skills as you improve and learn more. You don’t want your skills to atrophy. As I discuss here, when I do use LLMs for coding-related tasks, I purposely throw as much friction into the process as possible: To avoid falling into over-reliance on LLM-assisted code help, I add as much friction into my workflow as possible. I only use GitHub Copilot and Claude in the browser, not through the chat sidebar in Positron or Visual Studio Code. I treat the code it generates like random answers from StackOverflow or blog posts and generally rewrite it completely. I disable the inline LLM-based auto complete in text editors. For routine tasks like generating {roxygen2} documentation scaffolding for functions, I use the {chores} package, which requires a bunch of pointing and clicking to use. Even though I use Positron, I purposely do not use either Positron Assistant or Databot. I have them disabled. So in the end, for pedagogical reasons, I don’t foresee me incorporating LLMs into this class. I’m pedagogically opposed to it. I’m facing all sorts of external pressure to do it, but I’m resisting. You’ve got to learn first.

Some closing thoughts for my students this semester on LLMs and learning #rstats datavizf25.classes.andrewheiss.com/news/2025-12...

This game almost made me fail an exam 😃 addictive stuff!!

New paper in Nature Communications🥳

Our paper ’Expected effects of a global transformation of agricultural pest management’ led by Niklas Möhring is now online

Open Access www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Always cool to see these kinds of Wrapped-style summaries. I particularly like the Emoji overview as well 😀

Scatterplot of word use gap

I talk with my Research Methods students about publishing during the semester... and I was had a difficult time explaining why I personally avoid Frontiers similar to MDPI.

I will have less difficulty this coming year.

From: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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