Giving what we can has implemented a fun game where you spin a globe to see how your starting point in life would compare if you were reborn today, randomly somewhere on earth. www.givingwhatwecan.org/birth-lottery

From a medieval Old English text, remarkable common sense about Zodiac style prediction systems.

I regularly cite Prinz et al.(www.nature.com/articles/nrd...) as a ref for low replicability in (non-psych) preclinical research. Believe it or not: They've omitted which studies they attempted to replicate! I'm guessing this isn't news to everyone, but it was to me. Bizarre.

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I’m vocally skeptical of silicon samples, yet vocally impressed by SurveyBot3000. The difference: this does not rely on magic beans or assumed omniscience, it is trained and validated against a large corpus of highly relevant data and makes specific predictions with known accuracy and precision.

Contrasting to silicon samples, this type of method based on text embeddings seems to be both more principled and more robust in making predictions about scale and item correlations. Super happy to see this great work out!

Finally, @bjoernhommel.bsky.social's and my paper introducing the SurveyBot3000 is officially out in AMPPS. It's a fine-tuned language model that guesstimates correlations between survey items from text alone. Not perfectly, but useful for search, for example. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

What's the evidence? Oh it's a picture that makes school look even more like prison than usual. My first thought was that's a pack of cigarettes on the tables, but it's just the card deck.

At ERROR, we cannot compete with million-dollar bounties for whistleblowers. But it is great to see sleuthing work rewarded, and institutions admitting when their researchers engaged in misconduct.

Our paper on the ☀️ "summer slide" 🛝 is out now @pnas.org! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Summer slide is a replicable phenomenon across diverse datasets that's more than "forgetting" school material in vacation months, but effects of socioeconomic inequality are ➡️ 7x bigger! ⬅️ #PsychSciSky #DevPsy 🧵👇

I've used Lavaan almost every (work)day for 15 years, but this open source labour of love has never received proper institutional support. I'm delighted to be a small part of an 1.5M OpenScienceNL award, led by Jorgensen, to completely revamp and futureproof Lavaan www.openscience.nl/en/news/45-p...

While we are unable to offer publication in Nature Aging, we believe your manuscript may be suitable for our Gold Open Access sister journal.

New blog post: Clarifying research questions by sketching possible outcomes janhove.github.io/posts/2025-1...

Stefan Schubert (@stefanschubert.bsky.social) has a new blog! Instant subscribe. He's one of the little voices in my head by now when I evaluate stuff I read. theupdatebrief.substack.com

Post-publication peer review is at it best when it's thoughtful, scrupulous, steeped in detail – and challenges key claims of the paper. @janhove.bsky.social's discussion of a recent paper on multilingualism exemplifies this.

A recent study purports to have found that multilingualism protects against accelerated ageing. I've taken a closer look at it, and it doesn't look good. New blog post: "Does multilingualism really protect against accelerated ageing? Some critical comments" janhove.github.io/posts/2025-1...

deutsche Avengers

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Modern academic publishing part II: Sage has now blocked my (university) IP address because I have had a tab open for >4 hours since my license does not allow downloading. I now have to write my colleagues an email so that I can read papers that they are already paying an annual fee of ~100K€ for.

Psychologists, what are your favorite (open) data sets for teaching multilevel modelling? I have a lot of observational examples, would love a therapy RCT with varying effects for therapists or some such.

Congratulations to @bethclarke.bsky.social on her PhD graduation!! It’s been amazing watching you become the incredible scholar that you are, thanks for letting me come along for the ride! You’re the best! 🎉🥂🌟

A new PNAS paper finds that polarization increased immediately after the release of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” and the advent of the late-2000s electro-pop era, which both appeared around the same year, 2008.

The "smartphones/social media" discourse suffers from some amazing historical amnesia. There was no 2008 financial crisis and no global pandemic starting in 2020, it's all SCREENS SCREENS SCREENS. Major world events? Just the backdrop against which SCREENS happened.

I wrote about the bizarre case of Herasight, the embryo selection company going all in on eugenics.

Keeping this at hand in case I need to point to it and tap

Unfortunately not exactly my domain, but the graphs are very tempting and I have to commend the recruiting strategy.

Turned to a random page in this biography of Maurice Hilleman and look what I found

theme_saloni() when

I maintain that this is an excellent benchmark for d-type effect sizes: Sleep satisfaction & duration declined with childbirth & reached a nadir during the first 3 months postpartum, with women more strongly affected (satisfaction d = -0.79, duration minus 62 min, d = -0.90)>

"Visible learning" (Hattie) had a strong influence on what & how students have been taught around the world, including me during my master's at @unierfurt.bsky.social. Kalmendal et al. have a preprint out, detailing serious quality concerns in his non-peer-reviewed book: osf.io/preprints/ps...

I recommend reading this piece as well as her book. One thing the piece made me think about is that behaviour geneticists do not really study many traits that are a good fit for the Waddington landscape metaphor in the picture.

I rounded up some of the missing heritability discussions from the past few weeks and got the last word in (for now).

Nobody. I do not think you can eat chair

Metascientists step up as role models for a healthy error culture in science. Here is a great case where an author and a critical reader collaborated to set the record straight.

🎯 statsepi.substack.com/p/the-review...

I recommend reading this piece as well as her book. One thing the piece made me think about is that behaviour geneticists do not really study many traits that are a good fit for the Waddington landscape metaphor in the picture.

people tend to confide in me so i've gotten a LOT of tea over the years from fellow phd students about their bosses/advisors. all the more grateful have such reports made me for having done my phd with ruben. see also my nonnormative evaluation the last time he advertised a job.

I wrote about missing heritability, "missing environmentality," and why I still think twin studies are interesting and valuable: kathrynpaigeharden.substack.com/p/twins-are-...

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting next year? I'm hiring for a position at the University of Witten/Herdecke. uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/61280592...

I made an error that I found thanks to @lukaswallrich.bsky.social. The code and preprint have been corrected/updated. Effects on false positive rates are smaller and only for alternative and correlation method but I think the overall argument still works.

New paper by @ninanu.bsky.social: Estimating the Reliability and Stability of Emotional Variability Across Time online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art... We used Bayesian censored location scale models to estimate reliability and latent stability of positive and negative emotional variability.

Sentences I did not expect to read in Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science: "GohanShmohan denies having any metacognitive abilities whatsoever—a self-contradictory claim." journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

If you’re into beautiful graphs and rigorous science, check out Ruben’s new position at Uni Witten/Herdecke. I’ve worked with him for over a decade, and it’s been an inspiring, supportive collaboration throughout.

when you LOVE God but HATE the moon

Want to make nice graphs with me, starting next year? I'm hiring for a position at the University of Witten/Herdecke. uni-wh.softgarden.io/job/61280592...

Fadeout of cognitive training remains one of the more replicable findings in psychology in this preregistered study of 300 preschool children. Well-done study with a 4 year follow up. The language gains either faded or the control group caught up. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Voluntary retraction remains a key way to put scientific self-correction into practice. Zhu and Holmes (2024) did the right thing when they realized that some of their results were based on a coding error. Original: psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202... With retraction: psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Works the other way around too. “If I was Jonathan Haidt, how would I destroy the next generation?”