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...

there was some discussion on here recently about the scientific legitimacy of cognitive dissonance research. as someone who has spent years investigating this literature, i wanted to make a thread to explain why pessimism is not justified by careful inspection of the evidence 1/

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. 💖

🚨 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

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.

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

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...

🚨 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...

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

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.

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!