On April 7, 2016, Andrew Gelman declined two stories in one post and then named the problem this essay exists to address. A correspondent had sent him a McKinsey report on women in corporate America. He looked at it and decided to stay out of it. Another reader sent him a reported association between height and cancer, and he called it too difficult for him to understand and said he did not want to touch it. Then he closed by pointing out that his readers only see the studies he decided to write about.
Almost everything written about Gelman’s blog concerns his targets. The power pose, the ovulation studies, the himmicanes, Brian Wansink’s (b. 1960) bottomless soup bowl. He warns readers not to infer journal failure rates from his blog, since he sees bad papers because people send him bad papers. That warning is about the numerator. The denominator has never been examined, because the denominator sits in a private inbox.
But not all of it. Over twenty-two years Gelman has repeatedly narrated a decision not to write. He does it in passing, usually in one sentence inside a post about something else. Assembled, those sentences make a small archive of the road not taken: twenty-six decisions across twenty-two posts, from August 2009 through May 2026, each one a case where a piece of research reached him and he explained why he was letting it go.
Ten of the twenty-six come down to not having the energy. On the PACE trial and the chronic fatigue controversy, where he had contemplated a full investigation with interviews on all sides, he writes that he did not really have the energy to do it. On an apparent plagiarism case in economics he says it was just not something he had the energy to look into. Same phrase, more or less, on police shootings, on a weather-as-instrument paper in economics, on the pertussis dispute, on a reader’s multilevel model, on a book he was sent in 2026. Four more are outside his expertise. Four more are subjects he had already covered enough.
Eighteen of twenty-six. Tired, unqualified, or bored with the topic.
Two cases touch social cost. In July 2016 he received a juicy item connected to a recurring blog subject and withheld it because people might take it as a personal attack. And the McKinsey case, where the obstacle was the position from which he would be criticizing. Two out of twenty-six, and zero cases of protecting an author he knows.
I expected the declines to cluster in medicine, on the theory that he stays inside social science because that is where he can evaluate a paper cheaply. Medicine is prominent in the declines, seven of the twenty-two decisions with an identifiable field. But medicine is prominent in his attacks too. He goes after oncology trials, screen time and hypertension, olfactory enrichment in older adults. So the field is not the variable.
What clusters in medicine is the explicit admission of not knowing enough. Three of the four outside-my-expertise refusals are medical: height and cancer, Matthew Walker on sleep, and a Nature paper on HIV viremia with twelve subjects where a correspondent had raised pseudoreplication and Gelman declined to evaluate any of it.
Compare those to the medical papers he does attack. The oncology post turns on treating a p of .053 as a failed trial and on a proportional-hazards assumption that makes no sense. He can see that from his chair. He does not need to know anything about the cancer. The pertussis case, by contrast, requires untangling cohort effects against a vaccine schedule, and that would make him a partial epidemiologist for a week.
He engages when the statistical defect can be seen without resolving the underlying science, and declines when the case would require him to enter another discipline. That is a rule about the reach of a statistician’s authority, and he applies it honestly. It also means that whole classes of bad research are invisible to this kind of criticism, not because they are defended but because their errors are not the kind a statistician can spot from outside.
One pattern I can only raise as a question. Of the twenty-six declines, seven are economics, the largest single field. In the sixteen critical episodes drawn from the same pilot, economics appears zero times. That sample of sixteen is a convenience set and I would not report the ratio as a finding. But a man whose largest category of declines is the field he never appears to attack is worth a targeted study, and it bears on whether his target selection is even-handed across disciplines. I do not know the answer. I know the question is now askable, which it was not before.
Fourteen of the twenty-six are cases where Gelman published the item and declined to judge it.
Per Pettersson-Lidbom sent him criticisms of three economics papers. Gelman posted them and said he did not have the energy to look into the cases. Alexey Guzey wrote a long attack on Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. Gelman passed it along and wrote that he would not try to judge Guzey’s claims, since he had not read the book and knew nothing about sleep research. A correspondent’s pseudoreplication argument against the HIV paper got the same treatment. So did the placebo effect material, the economics plagiarism correspondence, the police shooting analysis.
Eleven of the twenty-six are a post that never happened. Fourteen are a post that happened while the investigation somebody wanted did not.
That second behavior needs a name and does not have one. It is not criticism, since he withholds judgment and says so. It is not neutrality either, since the item now sits on a blog read by the relevant profession, under a headline, with the accused party named. Whoever wrote the accusation gets Gelman’s distribution without Gelman’s endorsement, and the person accused gets the traffic either way.
He does this more often than he writes the takedowns he is known for.
I am not sure what to make of it. A blog is a bulletin board as well as a courtroom. Somebody has to circulate criticism that nobody has the standing or the hours to adjudicate, and the alternative is that the criticism goes nowhere. Gelman is transparent about it every time, which is more than most aggregators manage. And in the Walker case the underlying critique was substantial and eventually got a wide hearing.
But the cost lands on the person named. The same distribution that makes a Gelman post consequential when he has done the work makes it consequential when he has not, and the reader’s memory does not reliably preserve the difference between a paper Gelman demolished and a paper he mentioned while saying he had not looked into it. Two years later both are things you read about on that blog.
Which brings the essay back to the archive nobody can see.
On November 20, 2016, Gelman posted a list of unfinished drafts and said the folder held 434 of them. He printed fifty-six titles, describing them as the most recent few, and annotated some. Ovulation and clothing, set aside because the topic had had enough posts. Steven Levitt (b. 1967) on golf, with the note that he had had enough of that guy. One draft he had actually published and then removed at a colleague’s request. One where he never finished writing the title.
I tried to trace what happened to those fifty-six. Two were published later. Three had already appeared or been withdrawn. Two he says he abandoned. The remaining forty-nine cannot be traced either way, because titles like “Scientific and scholarly disputes” and “Is it hype or is it real?” do not support a search.
The queue tells a related story. In August 2016 he cleared his inbox and announced his next 170 posts, filling the blog into the following January. In August 2026 he did it again, and the lag had reached a year, with posts scheduled into August 2027. A reader in 2026 encountering a Gelman verdict on a study is reading a decision he made in 2025, about a paper that reached him in 2024, filtered through whatever he had energy for on the afternoon it arrived.
Two caveats.
These twenty-six were found by searching for the phrases in which a man narrates a decision. They are therefore the declines he chose to describe, selected by the same process under examination. Every silence that stayed silent is still silent.
And energy is the cheapest reason a person can give. It costs nothing socially, it implies no judgment of the author, it is always true in some degree, and it is available whenever the real reason is one you would rather not write down. Ten of twenty-six say energy. What the public record can establish is that energy is what he says. Whether it is the cause or the covering is beyond anything a blog archive can settle.
What the file shows is a working academic with a full-time job, a family, and a software project, who receives more material than he can process, who says no most of the time, who says no mainly because he is tired or out of his depth or has already done that one, who forwards a great deal of criticism he has not verified, and who keeps a folder of several hundred things he meant to write and never did.
On December 31, 2024, somebody sent him a statistical critique. He read enough of it to conclude that the new argument contained both good points and errors. He had things he could have said. He worked out that laying the groundwork would take more scaffolding than the payoff justified, called it a cost-benefit calculation, and decided the best option was not to bother.
That post is the closest thing to a controlled observation anyone will get from outside his inbox: exposure, followed by non-selection, with the reason stated by the man who made the decision.
