Uku Vainik
@ukuvainik.bsky.social
660 followers 610 following 210 posts
Professor of behavioral genetics with my own twins. I mix behaviour and genetics at Tartu & McGill to understand obesity. I also mix global music as a DJ.
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Reposted by Uku Vainik
matti.vuorre.com
Against Publishing: universonline.nl/nieuws/2025/...

Preprints are read, shared, and cited, yet still dismissed as incomplete until blessed by a publisher. I argue that the true measure of scholarship lies in open exchange, not in the industry’s gatekeeping of what counts as published.
Reposted by Uku Vainik
olgakhazan.bsky.social
I hate ultraprocessed foods as much as the next health reporter, but it's basically impossible to avoid them if you have kids www.theatlantic.com/family/2025/...
Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods Is Completely Unrealistic
Especially if you have kids
www.theatlantic.com
Reposted by Uku Vainik
ophastings.bsky.social
The GSS asked the same people about their childhood income rank three different times. 56% changed their answer, even though what was trying to be measured couldn’t change! We dig into this in a new article at @socialindicators.bsky.social. 



doi.org/10.1007/s112...

🧵👇 (1/5)
Growing up Different(ly than Last Time We Asked): Social Status and Changing Reports of Childhood Income Rank - Social Indicators Research
How we remember our past can be shaped by the realities of our present. This study examines how changes to present circumstances influence retrospective reports of family income rank at age 16. While retrospective survey data can be used to assess the long-term effects of childhood conditions, present-day circumstances may “anchor” memories, causing shifts in how individuals recall and report past experiences. Using panel data from the 2006–2014 General Social Surveys (8,602 observations from 2,883 individuals in the United States), we analyze how changes in objective and subjective indicators of current social status—income, financial satisfaction, and perceived income relative to others—are associated with changes in reports of childhood income rank, and how this varies by sex and race/ethnicity. Fixed-effects models reveal no significant association between changes in income and in childhood income rank. However, changes in subjective measures of social status show contrasting effects, as increases in current financial satisfaction are associated with decreases in childhood income rank, but increases in current perceived relative income are associated with increases in childhood income rank. We argue these opposing effects follow from theories of anchoring in recall bias. We further find these effects are stronger among males but are consistent across racial/ethnic groups. This demographic heterogeneity suggests that recall bias is not evenly distributed across the population and has important implications for how different groups perceive their own pasts. Our findings further highlight the malleability of retrospective perceptions and their sensitivity to current social conditions, offering methodological insights into survey reliability and recall bias.
doi.org
ukuvainik.bsky.social
FWIW, I don't think the next IQ GWAS would magically uncover everything that the bet expected to happen. But we would have high-powered SNPs for downstream social science genomics - genetic correlations, polygenic scores, and MR. Just like the up to 1M personality GWAS! doi.org/10.1101/2025...
Robust inference and widespread genetic correlates from a large-scale genetic association study of human personality
Personality traits describe stable differences in how individuals think, feel, and behave and how they interact with and experience their social and physical environments. We assemble data from 46 coh...
doi.org
ukuvainik.bsky.social
Shots fired! Waiting for response... and the next IQ GWAS!
ent3c.bsky.social
In 2018, Charles Murray challenged me to a bet: "We will understand IQ genetically—I think most of the picture will have been filled in by 2025—there will still be blanks—but we’ll know basically what’s going on." It's now 2025, and I claim a win. I write about it in The Atlantic.
Your Genes Are Simply Not Enough to Explain How Smart You Are
Seven years ago, I took a bet with Charles Murray about whether we’d basically understand the genetics of intelligence by now.
www.theatlantic.com
Reposted by Uku Vainik
steamtraen.eu
Next time an institution tells you how seriously it takes research misconduct, ask them if it's *this* seriously. www.bmj.com/content/297/...
In 1916 the BMJ published an article about the work done by James Shearer, an American physician working in the British Army as a sergeant (because he had no British qualification). He had described a
"delineator" which was better than x rays for portraying gunshot wounds. This caused a sensation and a lot of interest — but on investigation the work was found to have been invented. The BMJ published a retraction, but Shearer was tried by court martial and sentenced to death by firing squad.
ukuvainik.bsky.social
is TLDR that traits > states?
Reposted by Uku Vainik
mendelrandom.bsky.social
"Triangulation: moving from correlations to causation", Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine Distinguished Lecture 2025, Thursday, October 16th, 5pm, in person or online
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/school-of-...
ukuvainik.bsky.social
I am sure LLM could recover lots of personality nuances from single Rorschach image rating
ukuvainik.bsky.social
At the age of LLM one could automatically score the Rorchach test and scale up measurement at biobank level!
Reposted by Uku Vainik
erictopol.bsky.social
Is dark chocolate good for you?
"Sadly for chocoholics, the health claims for dark chocolate come from wishful thinking and sly marketing, not the findings of science."
Sorry
www.economist.com/science-and-...
Is dark chocolate actually healthy?
We assess whether that tempting idea is too good to be true
www.economist.com
ukuvainik.bsky.social
That would be really useful so that people could plan analyses before racking up the access costs with UK biobank
Reposted by Uku Vainik
andganna.bsky.social
💥 New preprint & our first RCT! 💥

Does an extremely high or low BMI polygenic score influence weight loss after a diet intervention?

GENEROOS is a 6-month randomized diet vs. control trial testing if genetic predisposition to higher BMI affects weight loss in overweight adults
Reposted by Uku Vainik
michelnivard.bsky.social
Synthetic non-parametric UKB phenotypes straight from an R package. It pulls all the required summary data from the UKB website.. Somewhat tempted to go totally overboad and have it simulate synthetic genomes, with plausible SNP h2's and "real" top hits (which i'd pull from GWAS cat & nealelab)..
ukuvainik.bsky.social
Very cool! This is something you're building? I cannot find it online, apart from this

biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk/synthetic_da...
UK Biobank Synthetic Dataset
biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk
ukuvainik.bsky.social
I rarely delete anything, apart from spam. This is my history! Although, Outlook is quite poor at finding anything I need😭
ukuvainik.bsky.social
Not to be missed!
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
Happy to announce that I'll give a talk on how we can make rigorous causal inference more mainstream 📈

You can sign up for the Zoom link here: tinyurl.com/CIIG-JuliaRo...
Causal inference interest group, supported by the Centre for Longitudinal Studies

Seminar series
20th October 2025, 3pm BST (UTC+1)

"Making rigorous causal inference more mainstream"
Julia Rohrer, Leipzig University

Sign up to attend at tinyurl.com/CIIG-JuliaRohrer
Reposted by Uku Vainik
davidbaranger.bsky.social
𝐀𝐝𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐟 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐳𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐞𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐬 | "Although interaction effects were detected, they were small and practically negligible in their explanation of variance in externalizing behaviors" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Additive and Interactive Relations of Personality and Cognition With Externalizing Behaviors - Nathaniel L. Phillips, Nathan T. Carter, Kevin M. King, Courtland S. Hyatt, Max M. Owens, Donald R. Lynam...
Personality and cognition offer robust frameworks to understand the individual differences associated with externalizing behaviors. However, these literatures h...
journals.sagepub.com