Ok, so a few things. 1. England has utterly fucked gender clinics, so referrals will be *obviously* be low: if you can't get even a first appointment, you're not going to be referred for surgery. The England referral rates are *substantially* lower than the need.

@theotheories.bsky.social · 2d ago

The WGS decision was apparently made on the basis of the Welsh Vs English whole population figures, not the number of patients seen in the clinic. This is absolutely ridiculous, serious medical decisions should not be made like this. It's not an appropriate comparison!

Anyone at the mass lobby today. You can tell them about my kid. Supported at school for years. Now out of school - driven out by hateful segregationist school policy introduced by Labour. Trans kids are being persecuted by this government

I spent 18 months doing reviews for the past, current, and future uses of AI in public health. They're done and preprinted now, so time for a post. This will be *long*, so, tldr in image. Research funded by NIHR, opinions expressed are mine alone, etc. etc. AI was *not* used to do these reviews.

I spent 18 months doing reviews for the past, current, and future uses of AI in public health. They're done and preprinted now, so time for a post. This will be *long*, so, tldr in image. Research funded by NIHR, opinions expressed are mine alone, etc. etc. AI was *not* used to do these reviews.

That's one take. Mine is that, when I die, I hope that people can't justifiably say that I had made their life, and the lives of their loved ones, substantially worse. When oppressors and abusers fall, the oppressed and abused have no compunction to be polite.

Ben Goldacre@bengoldacre.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Sad to see people posting on social media negatively about Rod Liddle, who died yesterday. If I have disagreed with you very strongly in life - and you die - I hope I'll be either silent, or kind.

Love the forest plots, @thehandlab.bsky.social

Nick Holmes@thehandlab.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Given the lack of different TMS latencies tested across drug studies, we turned back to the more traditional meta-analysis & forest plots (ie, one effect per group). The next few posts give meta-analyses of acetylocholinergic, GABAergic, & Catecholaminergic (i.e., L-Dopa) drugs. Here's ACh: 21/n

This is actually really fucking problematic. Forgetting the Gemini response, which I listen to only if I know the answer going in an need a reminder, how we can now trust any source on the internet? I've no idea if any of this is true, and now I can't trust any primary internet sources. Fuck.

James McLeod@jamespmcleod.ca · 2mo ago

It's safe to assume that all major LLMs are scraping Bluesky data to train future models. As an open protocol, Bluesky is one of the few sources of fresh human-generated content that anybody can gobble up. So all this is probably going in the models. There are submarines in the Great Lakes.

Apropos of nothing, I had a peer review back recently that was literally red pen on my manuscript, the only changes being: 1. Use passive voice (no, I use active voice to be clearer) 2. Remove the bullet points (no, bullet points are sometimes useful) That was it. bsky.app/profile/sean...

Sean Harrison, PhD@sean-h.bsky.social · last yr.

Some peer-reviews are public, so *sometimes* there's accountability, but there's still no guarantee the reviews were good: how many reviews are conducted by people (statisticians) who know the requisite methods? And who has been trained in conducting a good peer-review? 5/n

Counterpoint: Visibly (loudly, obnoxiously, whatever) announcing paternity leave is a good thing, as it normalises an experience that is still frowned upon in many businesses, and despite the UK having pitiful statutory paternity leave, is still under-taken (59%). www.gov.uk/government/c...

Parental leave and pay review: summary of existing evidence

gov.uk

Delegating thinking to someone or something else requires that person or thing to be benevolent or regulated to prevent (or mitigate) abuse. Are LLMs and the people who make them benevolent or regulated? bsky.app/profile/sean...

Aurelien Mondon@aurelmondon.com · 2mo ago

"Cognitive surrender" is a fascinating concept to think about the impact of AI as it exists under reactionary tech Preventing people from thinking for themselves and imagining different worlds is a godsend for authoritarians thenextweb.com/news/wharton...

I wrote my first academic article because the author of a different paper wouldn't listen when I said they were wrong.

John Attridge@johnattridge.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Academic writing should be addressed neither to the public nor to other academics. It should be addressed to a single interlocutor with whom you have a petty rivalry and whose work you are trying to discredit

Hi, I was a genetic epidemiologist for a while. You can edit the genes to remove only a very small proportion of diseases, the ones that affect a single gene in a deterministic way. Anything else is fantasy: genetics are predictive of disease, we have no idea which are causal.

Sheryl Weikal says Prosecute ICE@leftistlawyer.com · 4mo ago

I mean...as someone who has a chronic progressive autoimmune disease, I get the appeal of making sure no one in the future has Crohn's. But I also worry this is going to lead to a future of perfectly abled cisheteronormative aryan babies, and that frankly scares the shit out of me.

I once helped with finding evidence for the public health consequences of a week-long power shortage in the UK. Among the questions asked were: how many calories do people need to survive for a week? How much water? How infectious are dead bodies?

conifergirl.bsky.social@conifergirl.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The Impending Apocalypse AKA Shit is getting Real The Strait of Hormuz has largely disappeared from the headlines, which in itself should make every one of us nervous. In the modern media age, silence is often mistaken for resolution.

This about the size of it?

Sky News@news.sky.com · 4mo ago

Henry Nowak murder's has highlighted the debate on whether UK police are anti-white

I signed this! NHS England, or at least the people who commissioned the reviews, may be ideologically opposed to healthcare for trans kids, but they can't hide behind their intentionally awful evidence reviews to justify the ban they imposed on hormone treatments.

TransActual@transactualuk.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Over 80 clinicians, researchers and academics have signed an open letter raising serious concerns about NHS England’s recent evidence reviews of gender affirming hormone treatment for trans youth. Read the full letter here: transactual.org.uk/blog/2026/05...

How the fuck do you interpret the results without knowing the methods? Who were the population? How were they selected? Which country? When? Where the eligibility criteria justifiable? Does anything about how they were recruited lend itself to selection bias?

Dan Quintana@dsquintana.bsky.social · 4mo ago

As long as a paper's methods are described *somewhere* I don't think it matters where they are located in a manuscript

Because AI doesn't just replace labour, it replaces thinking. Software to improve efficiency helps create art (and science, technology, etc.). Software to replace thinking helps create slop no one wants.

Kieron Gillen@kierongillen.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The animation chat has me thinking one telling thing - in the years since AI arrived, there's not been a ground-up indie phenomenon, like we saw with earlier tech (Flash, etc). It hasn't unlocked anyone's creativity. For all the anti-gatekeeping rhetroic, nothing anyone cares about has been born.

I assessed these reviews when they were first published, and agree with almost all of what Gideon says. The research questions were designed to exclude any evidence that might exist. Biggest issue: they excluded studies where trans kids received GnRH analogues (puberty blockers) before hormones.

Rivers@finl3y.bsky.social · 4mo ago

www.genderplus.com/blog/indepen...

I assessed these reviews when they were first published, and agree with almost all of what Gideon says. The research questions were designed to exclude any evidence that might exist. Biggest issue: they excluded studies where trans kids received GnRH analogues (puberty blockers) before hormones.

Rivers@finl3y.bsky.social · 4mo ago

www.genderplus.com/blog/indepen...

Also, "If we don't releference properly, we end up standing in bullshit": seanharrison.blog/2025/02/21/i...

If we don’t reference properly, we end up standing in bullshit

Or: Do 30 million people really take NSAIDs every day? I wanted to know how many people in the world took non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). You know, aspirin, ibuprofen, diclofenac, n…

seanharrison.blog

Dr. Holly Walters@manigarm.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

For a non-academic article about the history of aspirin, I bought a physical copy of a 1940s German journal from Polish eBay to check a reference that didn't exist online. I transcribed the article from German & Google translated. Then put it online for everyone. press.asimov.com/articles/asp...

Dr. Holly Walters@manigarm.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

If modern life == comfort: Indoor plumbing (pipes, pumping stations, water purification). I just spent 3 days with my stopcock closed to stop my boiler from exploding, and it was awful. I can live comfortably without everything on that list. I cannot live comfortably without indoor plumbing.

John Scalzi@scalzi.com · 5mo ago

The folks at Time Magazine asked me what tech innovation I think defins modern life today, and my answer is anchoring a list that includes contributions from Tim Cook, Tracy Chou, Gabrielle Zevin and Ray Kurtzweil, among others. time.com/collection/o...

Lol, this is the funnel plot from the paper; there was no forest plot, for whatever reason. This is a good example of what a funnel plot should NOT look like (points should be symmetrical around the pooled effect estimate, not skewing massively in one direction).

Ketan Joshi@ketanjoshi.co · 5mo ago

A big study that was cited as evidence that text generators are good for students has been retracted: www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-wi... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My job is evidence synthesis in epidemiology/public health: I have read through tens of thousands of abstracts & thousands of full texts in the past year alone. I've been doing this for over a decade. I go through any studies included in my reviews in detail, including rigorous critical appraisal.

Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 5mo ago

Nice reminder that because a study is published in a journal does not mean it’s a good study or that its stated conclusions are reasonable! When people say they are “doing their own research,” even if reading primary literature, missing the context & subtleties can lead to wildly wrong conclusions.

Ok, so: this was met, justifiably, with many scathing responses. But what separates this from a *lot* of these types of things I have seen is that @barried.bsky.social replied to those responses with what I saw as real humility, and it looks like learning happened. And that's just so good to see.

Barrie D.@barried.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Dangerous philosophy. The difference: - Labour won't do anything to protect you. - Reform will actively hunt you and hurt you, with glee.

This feels identical to kids using LLMs to do their homework: the point of an analysis plan isn't (entirely) to do an analysis plan, it's to think through your analysis, which informs data collection and interventions, and does a lot of work up-front you'd otherwise have to do later.

Matt Parkes@mattyjparkes.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Having complicated feelings about this one…

Lukewarm take: the potential proportion variance explained in the outcome by the totality of the dataset is the hard ceiling for the predictive capacity of that dataset. Different methods aim to capture as much of that information as possible, but many models could be close to that ceiling.

Denis Mongin@denismongin.bsky.social · 7mo ago

I had this fight with a colleague last year. Exactly that: XGboost on 30k patient to predict remission. Didn't predict shit, as good as logistic regression performed properly. But the colleague wanted to go "look this giant step toward personalized medicine blablabla"

"Is a research question a promise of what we can deliver, or is it simply an expression of what we want to know?" Interesting article from @jeremylabrecque.bsky.social and @Katrina Kezios www.bmj.com/content/392/...

How and when to use causal and associational language

Deciding which concepts should be described in causal language and which should not Research questions fall into one of three categories: descriptive, predictive, or causal.1 The past decade has seen...

bmj.com

The problem, I think, is that science is often taught as a noun: "This is *the science*, learn it, memorise it, regurgitate it." I think we'd probably be better off teaching science as a verb: "Today, we're going to learn how to science the shit out of this." Skill-based learning >>> facts

David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Since I can’t sleep, here’s another hot take: The world would be a better place if everyone‘s science literacy was much better. There should be more emphasis on teaching basic science at all levels in school. Science isn’t just something nerds do, it’s the foundation of the modern world.

The gender roles that are forced on both women (and men) from before birth are so pervasive and dominant that I'd be astounded if there weren't any difference in measurements of "child rearing" between genders. Society (in the UK and elsewhere) is constructed such that "women raise children".

FinnMackay@finnfox.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Sonia Sodha is honestly on the wireless saying women are biologically better at rearing children than men. She found a single dad who agreed with her so it's all ok.