There seem to be a whole (older) cohort of eminent social psychologists who essentially do not understand the concept of sampling error, and I wonder to what extent that lack of understanding was an adaptive trait for a career.
Follow up on the genetics of chills from art and poetry. This time, including chills from music too 🧵 ⬇️
Article alert!🚨
1/11 Parents matter - and we can quantify part of that influence genetically. Our new JCPP paper on multivariate indirect maternal genetic effects across internalizing and externalizing symptoms. doi.org/10.1111/jcpp...
#jcpp @uio.no @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social @unioslo-uv.bsky.social
This very interesting project has finally been published. Congratulations! They find stronger genetic associations with place of residence than place of birth for many traits, showing that population stratification also involves active rGE. Read @iakuznetsov.bsky.social's thread here:
When talking about assortment and its genetic consequences for offspring you are necessarily talking about the dyadic mother-father similarity. Whether other people are involved is not relevant. As such, the framework still holds for non-monogamy, and does not make any claim on what is natural.
I drafted a letter to the editor, please help me out by DMing, commenting, emailing feedback if you are an expert on colliderbias, id obviosuly ad you as a author, Ideally we submit within 24-48 hrs, draft: zenodo.org/records/1800... (click download if the pdf doesnt preview on zenodo)
Welcome to my 2025 scientific publications wrapped!
It's been a good year for behavioral genetics, with exciting studies on the relationship between our DNA and socio-economic outcomes, sexual behavior, personality, intelligence, and psychiatric disorders 🧬
See thread below 👇🏽
A large language model (NotebookLM) prompted to give an overview of abbreviations used in a paper.
Since journal editors are still too lenient on excessive use of abbreviations, I found another use case for large language models:
One possible use case is to demonstrate that ripping a phone book in two is not about muscles but all about technique. I thought it was an outdated skill!
Or as I often say: Friends don't let friends use abbreviations!
We have a new paper out on personality and mate preferences. Check it out:
1/11 New @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social led by @ESSGNetwork PhD student @qiyuanpeng.bsky.social : Parental influence on children’s educational achievement using Trio-GCTA. doi.org/10.64898/202...
Who wants to join us in Oslo to study how health influences educational underperformance? We are hiring PhDs postdocs candidates for our funded project. We will follow children from birth to emerging adulthood, using behavioural genetic methods and large datasets 945000.webcruiter.no/Main/Recruit...
Its notable that some (in this case @mendelrandom.bsky.social (George Davey-Smith)) were on to him while he was alive, video a young GDS confronting Eysenk in a Q&A in 1994 for his data being inconsistent: youtu.be/K9pyS7EGCV8?...
Det er det samme i Norge. Finansieringsmodellen belønner studentens progresjon (studiepoeng, grader) og straffer de som stryker studenter. Studentenes rettsikkerhet er svært sterk, og innbyr til klaging m.v. Universitetene bør befris fra dette, og gjøres mer uavhengige!
Depends on the context I guess. For example for temperature, brighter would be "more".
If a lecturer wheels in an overhead projector with transparent sheets and markers, you’re about to witness either the best or worst lecture of your life. Nothing in between.
Cool plot, but took me a few seconds to realize that the colors were inversed relative to my expectations (brighter spot --> more expensive)
Figure showing event-study plots centred around the birth of one's first grandchild. The left plot shows health changes, the right shows labour market changes (separated by grandparent gender).
The image shows the following abstract: The Cost of Caring: Gendered Health and Labour Market Effects of Grandparenthood While the effects of the transition to parenthood are well-researched, less is known about how the transition to grandparenthood affects health and labour market outcomes. Using comprehensive Norwegian register data covering the entire population born between 1950 and 1960, we examine the effects of first-born grandchildren born during 2007–2018. Employing event-study models with person-year records, we compare grandparents to not-yet grandparents. Our findings reveal a sharp increase in the likelihood of respiratory infections during the first two years of grandparenthood, with infections increasing by 56% for women and 31% for men. Additionally, grandparenthood modestly reduces the likelihood of doctor’s visits related to mental disorders (4.5%) and cardiovascular health (3.3%). Grandmothers also see a decline in musculoskeletal-related visits (3.8%). These health-related changes coincide with notable gendered effects on labour market participation. Ten years after the birth of their first grandchild, employed women are 12% less likely to hold full-time positions compared to a 2% reduction for men. Overall, our findings demonstrate that the transition to grandparenthood significantly reshapes health and economic outcomes for both women and men. The larger effects observed for women likely reflect their greater involvement in informal childcare provision. Our results underscore the intersection of health, family dynamics, and gendered labour market behaviours in late adulthood.
New preprint📈📉
What happens to health and work when people become grandparents? Using Norwegian register data on all individuals born 1950-1960, we use event-study models comparing grandparents to not-yet grandparents to track changes in health and labour supply.
🔗 www.ssrn.com/abstract=571...
That's first-order epistasis, right?
Cross-country analyses of EA PGI associations are a crucial step towards an increased understanding of how genetic influences occur in conjunction with societal structures - but also of the inevitable challenges that come with doing so. See this new study out in Molecular Psychiatry! ⬇️
Getting grandchildren increases risk of respiratory infections, but also *reduces* risk of cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and psychiatric conditions. It also causes a (probably voluntary) reduction in employment and income, an effect that is larger for women (i.e., a gendered "grandchild penalty")
👀
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
One of the few times I'm reminded that Norway is *technically* not in the European Union
Ouch
1/ 🚨New paper in Nature Genetics
Genetic factors are associated with the educational fields people study, from arts to engineering.
Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
FAQ: www.thehastingscenter.org/genomic-find...
Better schools can compensate for dispositions
Excited to share this work led by @cktamnes.bsky.social (and featuring many colleagues from PROMENTA at @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social) exploring the links between psychological wellbeing and illbeing across biological, developmental, societal and intervention perspectives
