Evan Giangrande
@evangiangrande.bsky.social
180 followers 130 following 26 posts
Postdoc at Broad Institute, Mass General Hospital, & Harvard Med Psychiatric & Behavioral Genetics | Psychotic Disorders | Cognitive Development | Longitudinal Modeling Chair of Behavior Genetics Association Public Science Committee
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Reposted by Evan Giangrande
charlesdriver.bsky.social
Prepping for @dgps.bsky.social Methods, few recent papers pushing ctsem and dynamic models in interesting directions

#1 Developmental changes in twin cognitive correlation (ACE) across age, test instrument, zygosity, with @evangiangrande.bsky.social @ent3c.bsky.social et al

osf.io/preprints/ps...
evangiangrande.bsky.social
conspiracy theory-type rabbit-holes, where a lot of the online sources are fringe and hotly debated, it's easier to believe what All-Powerful-And-Knowing Chatbot says. Safeguards related to AI literacy could help.

I also really dislike his stigmatizing use of the word "crazy"
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Agreed, it's odd he implies that psychosis is either genetic or environmental. Most of this boils down to a diathesis-stress model, with AI-provided info as the stressor and, as @dingdingpeng.the100.ci mentions, dynamics. Big issue with AI is the apparent trustworthiness of the source. Cf...
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Philosophy <--> Science
carlbergstrom.com
1. The philosophy of science sometimes gets an unearned reputation as a purely academic exercise that offers little by way of concrete tools for advancing research.

This is wrong.

And today, as we grapple with how AI is changing the nature of scientific activity, it's desperately wrong.
evangiangrande.bsky.social
The causality facade isn't limited to AI/ML, of course. But the more complex and black-boxy the model, the easier that facade is to ignore/downplay.
evangiangrande.bsky.social
difficult to validate and built on untestable assumptions about the causal structure, confounds etc. Adding more covariates doesn't necessarily help. See "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" section on CausalML here arxiv.org/pdf/2206.15475
arxiv.org
evangiangrande.bsky.social
This has become my latest pet peeve. "Causal" is sexy and creates the impression that you're uncovering mechanism(s), but "causal estimates" are often just associational and/or reliant on strong assumptions that are rarely met.

E.g., CausalML applied to observational data. Cool, but...
ewanbirney.bsky.social
However, AI folk, it is going to be far, far better if we collectively call "back in time" or "left" in the normal way to lay out time as "antecedent" and *not* causal.
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Big thanks to @margotvdweijer.bsky.social for spearheading this effort! And to our coauthors @appelbap.bsky.social, Emily Bassett, and @lucasjmatthews.bsky.social
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Check out our preprint on ethical and legal considerations regarding Mendelian Imputation of missing parental genotypes! The method raises tricky questions about informed consent and potential harm. We highlight gaps in current practice and provide recommendations for researchers and IRBs.
margotvdweijer.bsky.social
New pre-print online: Imputing parental genotypes through Mendelian Imputation: Ethical and Legal Considerations
osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
Reposted by Evan Giangrande
kevinlala.bsky.social
I'm happy to share our latest manuscript "Impediments to countering racist pseudoscience", coauthored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social @kztwyman.bsky.social & Marcus Feldman.
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Combatting harmful misappropriations of behavioral genetics requires response at multiple levels, including organizational. To that end, the BGA Public Science Committee has released a Statement on the Misuse of Genetics
behaviorgenetic.bsky.social
Our public science committee published its first statement, 'against misuse of behavioral genetics research' on the website.

Read it now on the website ⬇️

bga.org/content.aspx...
Misuse of Genetics Statement - Behavior Genetics Association
Misuse of Genetics Statement
bga.org
evangiangrande.bsky.social
S/O to my advisors, @jorsmo.bsky.social and Ben Neale; our wonderful collaborators in Finland and @fimm-uh.bsky.social, especially Aarno Palotie and Olli Pietilänen; and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research @broadinstitute.org
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Global functioning is used widely to inform treatment and prognosis. In our sample, GF scores were associated with important severity- and course-related variables including hospitalization burden and cognitive performance.
evangiangrande.bsky.social
We addressed those gaps using the SUPER-Finland study, which includes linked register data for every single psychiatric hospitalization in Finland since 1969. Global functioning has been assessed routinely at inpatient admission and discharge nationwide since 1994. A peek at the raw GF scores:
evangiangrande.bsky.social
These results suggest that integrating genomics with clinically relevant, longitudinal phenotypes may help parse heterogeneity in schizophrenia severity, prognosis, and course.

Caveat: as is typical in Psych Gen, effect sizes were small and PGS are not sufficiently predictive for clinical use.
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Leveraging ~120k GF measures from a complete hospitalization register, we found that higher SZ PGS predicted worse GF at admission & discharge, and less functional improvement during hospitalization. Higher EA PGS predicted better discharge GF and greater improvement, but worse admit GF
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Tomorrow!! Check out a great panel on the communication of polygenic score research
behaviorgenetic.bsky.social
The BGA Public Science Committee will co-host Wednesday, May 14th, 11:00 AM-12:00 PM, US Eastern Time, an online symposium addressing how polygenic scores are communicated to the public, challenges of translating this research, and surrounding ethical & legal issues.
Registration: lnkd.in/eGgKgxmT
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Deadline tomorrow!! Already shaping up to be a great issue.
evangiangrande.bsky.social
🚨 2 weeks left to submit your abstract for our special issue 🚨

"Behavioral Genetics as a Public Science: Impacts and Implications" 🌏🧬

We welcome both empirical and theoretical articles that explore the broader significance of genetic research on human behavior

👇👇
link.springer.com/journal/1051...
Behavior Genetics
link.springer.com
evangiangrande.bsky.social
🚨 2 weeks left to submit your abstract for our special issue 🚨

"Behavioral Genetics as a Public Science: Impacts and Implications" 🌏🧬

We welcome both empirical and theoretical articles that explore the broader significance of genetic research on human behavior

👇👇
link.springer.com/journal/1051...
Behavior Genetics
link.springer.com
evangiangrande.bsky.social
Chapter 7 of Groth-Marnat, Gary (2016). Handbook of Psychological Assessment, Sixth Edition: Wiley.

Geared towards clinicians but provides a thorough history of MMPI development, updates, and psychometrics. PDF is available online!
evangiangrande.bsky.social
This is the first I've heard of "palliative psychiatry," a concept that strikes me as equal parts inaccurate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful.

Worth a read for Paul's insightful comments.
Reposted by Evan Giangrande
jeffspence.github.io
What do GWAS and rare variant burden tests discover, and why?

Do these studies find the most IMPORTANT genes? If not, how DO they rank genes?

Here we present a surprising result: these studies actually test for SPECIFICITY! A 🧵on what this means... (🧪🧬)

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Specificity, length, and luck: How genes are prioritized by rare and common variant association studies
Standard genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and rare variant burden tests are essential tools for identifying trait-relevant genes. Although these methods are conceptually similar, we show by anal...
www.biorxiv.org