Aliona Tsypes

Is risk-taking shaped by decision-making or by learning? In new work, we show that in experience-based risk-taking, very little variance is explained by decision-making (top), but a lot is explained by learning (bottom). www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Harvard faculty organize amid anxiety that the college will capitulate to Trump Harvard weighs costs of standing up to president as other elite schools, such as Princeton, signal they won’t concede

‘We have to be willing to stand up’

www.theguardian.com/education/20...

An important point getting overlooked:

When NIH cancels "diversity" grants (e.g., diversity supplements, Fs, Ks, etc), they aren't canceling the grants based on *what* the grant studies.

They're cancelling them based on *who* is doing the research. And that disallowed "who" is anyone not white.

🧵Censor, purge, defund - how Trump is following the authoritarian playbook on science & universities.

This isn't chaos - it's deliberate & well-established methods.

I've mapped 40 actions into 3 categories covering attacks on science, attacks on universities and international collaboration.

1/16

📢 Join us for the Stand Up for Science rally in Pittsburgh! We are bringing together a lineup of speakers from different backgrounds, who will share how science has made a difference in the world and in their own experiences.

The speakers include…🧵(1/3)

Pile of packages + photo of pin

Thank you friends for Standing Up for Science.

33 packages of Science Advocate pins are on their way to folks attending Friday @standupforscience.bsky.social rallies. They're heading to MA, DC, PA, NC, TX, NM, MJ, TN, AL, GA, MD, MN, CA, MS, FL, OH, WA, & NY.

The village is showing up!

Pittsburgh researcher warns NIH cuts could harm patient care, economic growth Pittsburgh's economy once relied heavily on the steel industry, which lined Second Avenue with miles of mills. When that industry collapsed, medicine and education filled the economic void.

Local traditional media still works!

We shot this interview on the grounds of the former J&L steel mill, where buildings including my lab are today. The threat to biomedical research in Pittsburgh is on par with the threat to the mills 50 years ago.

www.wtae.com/article/pitt...

I’m an NIH-funded researcher, drowning in uncertainty “I’ll keep doing what I can to move my research forward. But I, and so many others, can’t do this indefinitely,” this assistant professor writes

In my latest article for @science.org, I reflect on the current challenges faced by early-career researchers, including delays in grant reviews, uncertainty around NIH funding freezes and changes, and the critical need for continued support and advocacy.
www.science.org/content/arti...

Revealed: NIH research grants still frozen despite lawsuits challenging Trump order The Trump administration is exploiting a loophole to keep a funding freeze in place, leaving researchers in limbo.

Almost all grant-review meetings under Trump 2.0 remain suspended at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), preventing the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research from spending much of its US$47 billion annual budget.


https://go.nature.com/4gM6oW4

The court ordered that NIH grant funding be unfrozen, so The Regime found a way around it. For NIH grants to be funded, a review panel must rank them. In order for a review panel to meet, they must post it on the Federal Register. Submissions to the Federal Register are now on hold “indefinitely”.

Great explainer on the Federal Register block and how it affects all NIH grant-related activities 👇

Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky After recent changes to Elon Musk’s X, a gradual migration turns into a stampede

This is a good analysis explaining why the scientic migration to bluesky worked when it failed to take hold with mastadon, threads, or linkedin.

The key is network effects: Moving an entire community is hard and people are reluctant to leaveit www.science.org/content/arti...

Writing is thinking.

It’s not a part of the process that can be skipped; it’s the entire point.

you don't say

A scientist new to Bluesky? @steveharoz.com and @markrubin.bsky.social have put together some great resources to get you started!

Social expectations in depression

Review by Lukas Kirchner, Tobias Kube, Max Berg, Anna-Lena Eckert, Benjamin Straube, Dominik Endres & Winfried Rief

Web: go.nature.com/41kXLO1
PDF: rdcu.be/d2yHr

#psychology #psychscisky #clinpsy

Naturalistic encoding of concepts in the brain

@viktorkewenig.bsky.social shows that, while concepts generally encode habitual experiences, the underlying neurobiological organisation is not fixed but depends dynamically on available contextual information. 👏🍾🐐

elifesciences.org/articles/91522

This is an excellent conversation with leading treatment developers on the state of the science in effective suicide-focused care and how to get these treatments to be widely implemented so that they're accessible to those who need them.

I would add: be sensitive to the purpose this diagnosis is serving in ur clinical context (is this your way of saying that this is a “difficult patient” or your way of recognizing deeper recurrent dynamics beneath mood issues to guide treatment) & whether the patient finds the diagnosis acceptable…

I've now read a bunch of papers like this -- ABMs where the agents' behaviors are driven by generative AIs. They often tell us interesting things about the AI algorithms, but never in my experience have we learned anything new about people.

Opinion | ‘We Tire Very Quickly of Being Told That Everything Is on Fire’ Why invoking a public health crisis too often can lead society astray.

Crisis framing activates fatalism (a sense the world is beyond repair), which makes people apathetic.

A far better strategy for inspiring action is to show that change is not only desirable but also possible www.nytimes.com/2024/11/21/opinion/public-health-crisis-america.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

I’m excited to share our new, open-access paper published today in NatMentHealth, “Latent mechanisms of language disorganization relate to specific dimensions of psychopathology”. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

If you think Bluesky is cool now, just wait until we start getting sophisticated feeds that curate cool papers, data, or code based on intelligent custom algorithms. This will become a second layer of scholarly communication.

Do you ever wonder whether the work you do matters? Like whether anyone needs to hear what you have to say?

I do. A 🧵

Funny thing happened to me this week. I was giving a talk where I reviewed my work.

I started with the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP).

1/

😻

Late seeing this post, but I'll be there as well!