Medical statistician, full professor KU Leuven. Prediction, running, cycling, walking, darts.
Leuven, Belgium
Joined July 2018
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Ben Van Calster retweeted
Spearheaded by @DavidKlaveren & with co-authors @stats_research, Patrick Serruys, @benvancalster our new article in Stat in Med provides a minimal-assumption way to estimate the relationship between survival probability and a continuous variable: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/… #Statistics
Ben Van Calster retweeted
Griet Vandermassen heeft het nu, alvast volgens de Hate Review van de Belgische vzw Forbidden Colours, ook officieel tot TERF geschopt. Dat is niet iets om blij van te worden, integendeel. De morele grandstanding en biofobie die hiertoe leiden maken een gezond debat over gender onmogelijk.
standaard.be/opinies/wie-is-…
Ben Van Calster retweeted
My speech at the UN Human Rights Council:
I grew up in Yemen. I know how our Arab rulers teach us to blame all of our troubles on the Jews. But our problem in the Middle East is not Israel.
It is our Islamist dictatorships that brutalize our people, then offer us Israel as a scapegoat.
🔥 RARE MOMENT OF TRUTH AT UNITED NATIONS: As world leaders used the UN podium to condemn Israel, we invited courageous Yemeni journalist @JustLuai to tell the truth: “Our problem in the Middle East is neither Israel nor the Jews. It is the Islamist dictatorships.”
Ben Van Calster retweeted
🔥 RARE MOMENT OF TRUTH AT UNITED NATIONS: As world leaders used the UN podium to condemn Israel, we invited courageous Yemeni journalist @JustLuai to tell the truth: “Our problem in the Middle East is neither Israel nor the Jews. It is the Islamist dictatorships.”
Ben Van Calster retweeted
Dear West,
It's not racist to have a rational immigration policy.
___________________________________________________
00:55 - 60,000 people broke into Ceuta, Spain
05:39 - Why only the extremes speak up
06:32 - Humans are hardware, culture is software
10:49 - Designing a sane immigration system
19:35 - Counterargument 1: They just want a better life 20:59 - Counterargument 2: They're desperate
21:38 - Counterargument 3: They're fleeing a climate crisis
22:07 - Counterargument 4: Rich countries should absorb them
22:35 - Counterargument 5: Europe needs the workers 22:51 - Counterargument 6: Diversity is a strength
23:37 - Counterargument 7: Immigrants built this country
24:05 - Counterargument 8: Ceuta isn't really Spain 24:36 - Counterargument 9: Colonialism did this
26:32 - What every argument leaves out
27:24 - Western civilization is worth protecting
Ben Van Calster retweeted
Wat die honours-programma's aan de universiteit betreft (artikel in DS, link onderaan), vroeger ging het anders: wie een buitengewone interesse of aanleg had, ging op eigen houtje extra boeken lezen. Die had daar de sturende hand van een extra college of een extra docent niet voor nodig. Nu moet er blijkbaar een heel programma omheen gebouwd worden. Het laat zich raden wat er zal gebeuren: studenten zullen koste wat kost in dat programma willen geraken, ook als ze zelf in het middelmatige segment zitten. Met de gebruikelijke red-queen-effecten. De cv-waarde zal onderhevig zijn aan de wet van Goodhart.
(Als de universiteit te gemakkelijk is voor sterke studenten, kun je trouwens ook de universiteit selectiever maken. Dat is eigenlijk efficiënter. De massificatie van het academisch onderwijs is niet altijd een goede zaak.)
standaard.be/binnenland/exce…
Ben Van Calster retweeted
In American medicine, research is the price of admission but rarely a viable career. Trainees are told it's essential for competitive medical school and residency positions. As faculty, they confront scarce protected time, billing-driven productivity metrics, low grant-funding rates, long funding cycles, and salary-cap gaps their institutions are asked to absorb, just as family and financial obligations grow. Pragmatic clinical research is poorly supported, especially outside well-resourced centers. The incentives favor delivering costly care over improving it.
Ben Van Calster retweeted
Das muss man sich mal vorstellen: solche gewaltbereite Linksradikale wollen in #Berlin regieren. #Berlinwahl
Ben Van Calster retweeted
Even gevraagd welke Islamitische gezangen precies werden aangeheven tijdens de eucharistieviering voor de plechtige opening van het academiejaar (KULeuven).
Nou, als dit klopt, is het niet bepaald oecumenisch. Het kan die KULeuven-mensen blijkbaar niet veel schelen. "Zing maar iets in het Arabisch, whatever." Anderen kan het meer schelen.
Ben Van Calster retweeted
Are you interested in pursuing a PhD fellowship in trials methods research in adaptive and platform trials? Interested in developing new methods and statistical implementation tools? Do you have a strong mathematical or/and statistical background?
Ben Van Calster retweeted
New ad by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products.
Ben Van Calster retweeted
We've got 2 online IPD meta-analysis training courses this Autumn, with places still available - one is a general introduction about doing IPDMA projects (the whole process, not just the stats bit) & the other is about the statistical modelling aspects 👇
ipdma.co.uk/training-courses
Beschuldiging aan het adres van een Vlaamse professor (@ugent)... Dit tijdschrift is alleszins al een tijd erg problematisch.
Jörg Rinklebe & Sabry M Shaheen (@Uni_Wuppertal); Daniel C.W. Tsang (@hkust) & Yong Sik Ok (Korea university) suffer another retraction because their friend, corrupt editor, Filip Tack from @ugent edited there paper! 👇#fraud
doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.…
Ben Van Calster retweeted
If you ever needed a summation of how I feel about the gender madness, here ya go.
He nails it.
Julian Cross on insta
Ben Van Calster retweeted
Universities reward scientists for how effectively they can package themselves and their work to enhance an institutional brand that can be monetized. The underlying science is secondary, if relevant at all.
In biology, much of the fundamental work has been forgotten.
The money and prestige now go either toward presenting routine findings as cures for disease or presenting upper corporate administration with a carefully staged image of a diverse scientific workforce.
One things that stuns me about this is that it doesn't matter just how many press releases come out about some supposed breakthrough that we never hear of again, it works every time. Not just in medicine, but in basically every other area. Battery breakthroughs, PFAS, quantum internet, etc. There are press releases about this basically every day and it's 99% bullshit. And this is the top of the tops, the stuff that universities brag with, let's not even get started on the rest. Still people refuse to acknowledge that academia has a serious problem.
Ben Van Calster retweeted
Jason Arday shouldn’t be dead.
But he is dead - because he didn’t tell the truth.
And Cambridge University didn’t look for the truth - because he’s black.
And fellow black professors didn’t ask for the truth - because he is black.
Jason lied repeatedly.
And he told the exact lies that allow one to excel in the system that elite universities have adopted.
A system that factors in race, hardship, and lived experience under the banner of equity, instead of pure performance.
Nearly everyone in these institutions ignored Jason’s lies, to try and protect black people.
They called the people seeking the truth racists.
Of course there were some racists.
But the majority of people just wanted the truth.
Avoiding the truth didn’t help black people.
Double standards in academia aren’t helping black people.
They hurt the perception of black people who are truly the best, and would have held prestigious positions at elite schools, solely off the merits of their performance.
Double standards always backfire.
Even when well intentioned.
Even when intended to correct for past oppression.
Race-conscious hiring and admissions have created a situation where it is rational to wonder whether a black person has achieved their position because they were simply the best, or because they were good enough, and black.
This is not a racist thought.
It’s a rational thing to wonder when a system promotes people based on race.
It’s a thing I’ve wondered about myself, as someone who graduated from Harvard - which had race-conscious admissions.
No amount of insistence that it’s racist will make it racist.
It’s no more racist than it would be to wonder whether a white player got into the NBA off of just performance, if the NBA decided to focus on “fixing” the underrepresentation of white people.
This is the logical downside of race-conscious hiring and admissions.
You can think the downside is worth the upside.
But the downside remains.
Calling people with legitimate concerns racist didn’t protect black people.
It didn’t protect Jason.
It hurt black people who have earned their positions.
And it allowed a troubled man who built his career on lies to rise to a height so great that his fall from grace killed him.
We could have just had the truth.
Instead, we have a tragedy.
Ben Van Calster retweeted
UC Berkeley Professor Zvezdelina Stankova reveals the semester she first watched a third of her calculus class collapse, having to lower grade cutoffs and redesign her syllabus on the fly
"In spring 2023, I'm teaching calculus two, second semester calculus at Berkeley."
"I had something between 12 and 1400 students in two classes."
"And for the first time, I noticed that about a third of them were disengaged with the class after week two."
"They would not come to lecture. There would be a missed quiz here, not submitted homework there. The first midterm was a disaster. I never seen anything like this before."
"And don't get me wrong, we have still fantastic students at the higher end. But the lower end was so far behind, so many standard deviations behind their classmates."
"So I on the fly had to redesign the syllabus to make it easier, more accessible. I introduced bonus points. I introduced polls in class just for participation. Come and answer these multiple questions on your phone and we will give you some credit."
"And even then, this bottom third did not come to class. I had to revise my grade cutoffs, I lowered them down in order to help students pass the class. And belatedly now, in retrospect, I find that this was a wrong decision."
"I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school." sfstandard.com/opinion/2026/…
This. Academia fails on so many levels, but it feels to me that many people in it haven't noticed yet and still feel complacent. Keep publishing!
Ben Van Calster retweeted
This is a post for any progressive left-wingers out there who haven’t completely entrenched themselves in a belief system they can’t reverse out of.
I used to be part of your tribe, and I still believe many of the things you do.
I want a fairer more peaceful world. Racism is wrong. I want us to protect the planet. I think it’s obscene that some people are unimaginably rich while others are dirt poor. And I recognise that the more unequal societies become, the more dangerous and divided they become.
You see, I agree with all that stuff. It’s not hard to admit it.
But these days Greta Thunberg wears a keffiyeh and even a balaclava sometimes. Dale Vince wears a keffiyeh. Zack Polanski of the Green Party seems more concerned about helping men who believe they are women gain access to women’s spaces than he does about ecological crises.
Identity politics is divisive. Gender ideology is poisonous and harms children and women’s rights.
And here’s the thing: you don’t have to buy into any of that crap to still want a better world.
If there are reasonable progressives reading this and thinking, “It’s true. I hate some of the stuff my tribe is doing,” then you can leave it behind. You don’t have to become a raving right-winger. It’s not a zero sum game. You can just return to the centre ground.
You don’t have to agree with me either. I do have some reactionary views. But I’ve not lost the plot. I am always willing to hear the views of others and reconsider my opinions.
But the time is long overdue to call out beliefs that are simply nuts, sideline them, and get back to what progress was supposed to be about: creating a freer, fairer society for the vast majority of ordinary people. Education, good jobs, a country built on shared values, rights and responsibilities.
Not using identity as a weapon. Not demanding that one group surrender its rights for another. And not dragging vulnerable kids into a vortex of gender confusion that will have consequences for the rest of their lives.
So come on, reasonable people. Ask yourself some questions. Question your own side as fiercely as you question the other.
Let’s stop playing the algorithmic game, stop retreating into our tribes, and get back to some form of sanity.