My letter responding to The Economist’s “designer babies” editorial is out. The editorial cites our study on public attitudes toward polygenic embryo screening but omits a key finding: attitudes became less favorable when participants first considered potential concerns. Link below.

"a PRS is not an internal predisposition waiting to be realized; it is a risk estimate derived from a model constructed from population-level DNA associations without clearly defined biological mechanisms."

Eric Turkheimer@ent3c.bsky.social · 4mo ago

With @remyfurrer.bsky.social, a new piece in Nature Human Behavior. The standard description of a polygenic score as a "genetic predisposition" essentializes a statistical construct. It's not language policing: PGS are a new kind of entity; now is the time to think carefully about what they are.

With @remyfurrer.bsky.social, a new piece in Nature Human Behavior. The standard description of a polygenic score as a "genetic predisposition" essentializes a statistical construct. It's not language policing: PGS are a new kind of entity; now is the time to think carefully about what they are.

Polygenic risk scores are not genetic predispositions - Nature Human Behaviour

Nature Human Behaviour - Polygenic risk scores are not genetic predispositions

nature.com

We asked people around the world to rate the morality and ethics of others in their country. The U.S. is the only place we surveyed where more adults describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad than good. See our full morality report here: www.pewresearch.org/...

Polygenic embryo screening is being marketed commercially – but how do IVF clinicians view it? • General approval is low (12%) For specific uses: • 59% approved of health-related embryo selection • 6% approved of trait-based selection 🧵 Survey findings in NPJ Genomic Medicine

A meta-analysis of the impact of polygenic risk score disclosures on health outcomes. 27 RCTs, max follow up 12 months. For 22 outcomes tested in >=2 trials, "Meta-analysis revealed no statistically significant effects on any measured outcome" www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Effects of polygenic risk score communication on health outcomes: systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract Objective. The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to summarize evidence from all RCTs to-date on the efficacy of polygenic risk score (PRS) communication in changing healt...

medrxiv.org

Here is another way to put the paradox. If you ask, "If I had different genes, would my personality be different?" Then the answer is, "Probably, yes." If you ask, "If I had THESE genes, what would my personality be like?", the answer is, "We don't have any idea."

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

The reaction to this being essentially completely positive has me pleasantly surprised. I sometimes get so worried that such analyses aren't wanted anymore and people just want to be left alone to gloat while cheating on coursework and rot their brains with vibe coding... Thanks everyone. 💖

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · last yr.

Boiling here at home in Cyprus but I put the finishing touches a couple of days ago on this preprint: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? doi.org/10.48550/arX... Wherein I analyse HCAI & demonstrate through 3 triplets my new tripartite definition of AI (Table 1) that properly centres the human. 1/n

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Inform and Do No Harm: A Novel Approach to Reduce Negative Effects of Mental Health Awareness My student Dasha Sandra tackled growing concerns about false self-diagnosis following awareness efforts and found a promising solution. Thread /1 osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our NEW STUDY on public views of neurotechnologies used for mood, memory, and motor🧠 conditions is out in @cellpress.bsky.social Device. 📰Open Access: cell.com/device/fullt... From the Neurotech Justice Accelerator (NJAM) at MGB, a Dana Center for Neuroscience and Society

Public perceptions of neurotechnologies used to target mood, memory, and motor symptoms

Furrer et al. conducted a US-based survey on the perception of neurotechnologies for treating mood, memory, and motor symptoms. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) was seen as the most invasive and risky, le...

cell.com

I am seeing news that AI companies face “unexpected” obstacles in scaling up their AI systems. Not unexpected at all, of course. Completely predictable from the Ingenia theorem.

Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 2y ago

The intractability proof (a.k.a. Ingenia theorem) implies that any attempts to scale up AI-by-Learning to situations of real-world, human-level complexity will consume an astronomical amount of resources (see Box 1 for an explanation). 13/n

New preprint! My entry into the ongoing AI empathy discussion: "Reframing the performance and ethics of 'empathic' AI: Wisdom of the crowd and placebos." osf.io/preprints/ps...

Suppose Person A orders Person B to hurt you. Then Person B does exactly what she was ordered to do. Who would you see as the main cause of what happened to you - Person A or Person B? Intriguing new work from @vanessachg.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵Thread overview of ALL my publications related to "Cognition and Intractability" in chronological order: 🌟

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

Introducing PowerLMM.js! A new tool for power analysis of longitudinal linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) – with support for missing data, plus non-inferiority and equivalence tests. powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com Would really appreciate your feedback as I refine this app! Details below 🧵👇

Interventions that enable individuals to circumvent obstacles, offers social support, provides incentives, and highlights healthy social norms are very effective at changing behavior. Changing emotions, attitudes, and beliefs, doesn't help much. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Pronin & Kugler (2010) found: People evaluated their own decisions & life events as less predictable than similar decisions & life events of others, presumably reflecting higher self-centered free will attribution. A replication team paper I played a small part in just published: Mostly successful.

I was very struck by this new Moss et al. theory about why people sometimes endorse moral relativism Just wanted to say a little more to bring out what is so deep and interesting about their new idea

Experimental Philosophy@xphilosopher.bsky.social · 2y ago

Studies find a mix of people espousing moral relativism and people saying that moral claims can be objectively true. What explains this mix? Moss et al. provide evidence for a surprising answer: Espousing moral relativism is a way to signal tolerance; objectivism is a way to signal intolerance

Want to hear something funny? Yeah, me neither. But it's out of my control: My book, Understanding The Nature-Nurture Debate, was released today. Not today, but I hope everyone will forgive me if I write a little about it over the next few weeks. www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

Ahead of tomorrow's election, I published a piece in the BOSTON GLOBE based on our research showing that gradient maps—unlike typical red-blue maps—reduce perceived polarization and empower voters by making them feel their vote has a greater impact. www.bostonglobe.com/2024/11/03/o...

A better way to map the election - The Boston Globe

Researchers have found that adding nuance to the way we represent voting results on election night could help combat polarization and voter apathy.

bostonglobe.com

🚨 NEW STUDY!!🚨 Sharing our latest paper published in JAMA Network Open: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... "Public Attitudes, Interests, and Concerns Regarding Polygenic Embryo Screening" I share some thoughts on the findings in Harvard Medical School's news release: hms.harvard.edu/news/study-r...

The first study looks at election maps: "Red and blue states: dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence" by @remyfurrer.bsky.social , @kbschloss.bsky.social, @glupyan.bsky.social, @pniedent.bsky.social, @adriennewood.bsky.social doi.org/10.1186/s412...

Red and blue states: dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence - Cognitive Res...

In the United States the color red has come to represent the Republican party, and blue the Democratic party, in maps of voting patterns. Here we test the hypothesis that voting maps dichotomized into...

doi.org

Coverage of our research demonstrating that "dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence" + More dataviz studies related to politics in the journal from the data visualization society

Eli Holder@elibryan.bsky.social · 3y ago

New Nightingale post! Election season is upon us. How might dataviz 📊 fuel the coming dumpster fire 🗑🔥? This post unpacks three recent visualization studies, exploring how cliches in political data journalism can subtly undermine the democratic process. nightingaledvs.com/divisive-dat...

Deviating from a preregistration can be justified if it leads to a test with higher validity - even if this comes at the cost of a less severe test (which is likely still more severe than if you had not preregistered). I give examples in Table 1.

Daniel Lakens@lakens.bsky.social · 3y ago

New preprint: When and How to Deviate from a Preregistration osf.io/preprints/ps... I hope this helps researchers to reflect on the consequence of deviations from preregistrations by evaluating the test's severity and the validity of the inference.

The Boston Globe covers our study on public opinion towards polygenic screening of embryos. “… In the absence of regulation, at least in the United States, 'we need to start educating the public so that they can make informed decisions,' he says.” www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/07/o...

The talk recordings from the "Causality in Minds and Machines" workshop are live now. sites.google.com/view/causali... Thanks again to all the speakers and to the Society for Mathematical Psychology for sponsoring the workshop!