For what it’s worth, @ent3c.bsky.social and I worked on related problems some years ago. We argued that there is a theoretical reason for measuring overall valence separately pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23773039/

You can imagine an AI agent that could learn to tell time by watching the position of the gears. re: HD. It's the same thing. We think of the clinical signs of the disease as the consequent, and they gene as the cause, but why? They are two parts, at different scales, of the same entity. /end

Thanks for the comment. re: clocks. If you turn the hands on a clock, the gears move inside. They are linked across scales by a mechanism (see Craver and Bechtel). One doesn't cause the other: they are two parts of the same thing. The correlation of the hands to time of day is a human convenience /1

Yes, it worked out for me, and afaik the investigators whose work I was criticizing are doing fine. Without opening the can of worms all the way, it wasn't just the premises....

Agreed, though I think it is important to acknowledge how difficult it is. It isn't something you can do without naming names. People are hurt and friendships ended. Though I stand by every word of it, I am not over my ambivalence about publishing this paper.

Rode in an elevator in NYC with Spiro Agnew. When he got off, someone said, "Everyone check your wallet."

The Pettersson paper is much more circumspect, though they too reach fairly strong conclusions about population associations holding up within families. I am generally skeptical we can learn much about these issues when we start with such tiny population effect sizes. Time will tell.

I'm embarrassed to report that I was incorrect when I stated that this paper was first on the scene of within-family psychopathology. In fact this paper by my former student @erikpett123.bsky.social did it three years ago, finding much the same thing.

Here is a meme from @hfsunde.bsky.social while I think about getting back to work... /end.

Everyone from the guy at the registration desk to the nurses to the residents to the attending surgeon were kind and respectful. Now on to the super-competent physical therapists. I think a lot about 70 year olds not very long ago who were consigned to living out their lives in pain. Grateful. /3

I am privileged to live next to a major university medical center with reasonably good insurance, for the US. Under those conditions, even though our overall health system is a political and economic mess, once you make it to the clinic (I waited in pain for three months) the people are so nice. /2

I haven't seen it suggested explicitly that the ongoing vibe-cession is a consequence of inequality. No matter how well one is doing in real terms, it is hard to enjoy while watching the oligarchs party at Mar a Lago.

I would love for a reporter to ask him, "Can you explain what a standard error is?"