Rémy Furrer

Here is another way to put the paradox. If you ask, "If I had different genes, would my personality be different?" Then the answer is, "Probably, yes." If you ask, "If I had THESE genes, what would my personality be like?", the answer is, "We don't have any idea."

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.

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.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

The reaction to this being essentially completely positive has me pleasantly surprised. I sometimes get so worried that such analyses aren't wanted anymore and people just want to be left alone to gloat while cheating on coursework and rot their brains with vibe coding... Thanks everyone. 💖

🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Inform and Do No Harm: A Novel Approach to Reduce Negative Effects of Mental Health Awareness

My student Dasha Sandra tackled growing concerns about false self-diagnosis following awareness efforts and found a promising solution. Thread /1

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Read about our findings on public perceptions of neurotechnoloigies in this
@MGBResearchNews
research highlight: massgeneralbrigham.org/en/about/new...

Participants also rated each technology on:
🔹Perceived benefit
🔹Acceptability
🔹Likelihood of using it themselves
🔹Invasiveness
🔹Risk
🔹Perceived change to the person

Would you consider using these neurotechnologies if you were experiencing severe mood, memory, or motor symptoms?

Here’s how 1000+ U.S participants responded when asked that exact question.

Participants were then presented with 4 neurotechnologies:
🔹 Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS)
🔹 MRI-guided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS)
🔹 Pills
🔹 Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

1000+ Participants were randomly assigned to read about a person experiencing one of three types of symptoms:

🔹Mood symptoms
🔹Memory symptoms
🔹Motor symptoms

Public perceptions of neurotechnologies used to target mood, memory, and motor symptoms Furrer et al. conducted a US-based survey on the perception of neurotechnologies for treating mood, memory, and motor symptoms. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) was seen as the most invasive and risky, le...

Our NEW STUDY on public views of neurotechnologies used for mood, memory, and motor🧠 conditions is out in @cellpress.bsky.social Device.

📰Open Access: cell.com/device/fullt...

From the Neurotech Justice Accelerator (NJAM) at MGB, a Dana Center for Neuroscience and Society

I am seeing news that AI companies face “unexpected” obstacles in scaling up their AI systems.

Not unexpected at all, of course. Completely predictable from the Ingenia theorem.

New preprint! My entry into the ongoing AI empathy discussion:

"Reframing the performance and ethics of 'empathic' AI: Wisdom of the crowd and placebos."

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Suppose Person A orders Person B to hurt you. Then Person B does exactly what she was ordered to do. Who would you see as the main cause of what happened to you - Person A or Person B?

Intriguing new work from @vanessachg.bsky.social

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Figure 3 from "The Tractable Cognition Thesis (van Rooij, 2008): "According to the Tractable Cognition thesis, the set of functions describing possible cognitive capacities is a subset of the set of tractable functions. The dotted line indicates that the set of tractable functions remains to be formalized."

🧵Thread overview of ALL my publications related to "Cognition and Intractability" in chronological order: 🌟

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

Introducing PowerLMM.js!

A new tool for power analysis of longitudinal linear mixed-effects models (LMMs) – with support for missing data, plus non-inferiority and equivalence tests.

powerlmmjs.rpsychologist.com

Would really appreciate your feedback as I refine this app! Details below 🧵👇

Interventions that enable individuals to circumvent obstacles, offers social support, provides incentives, and highlights healthy social norms are very effective at changing behavior.

Changing emotions, attitudes, and beliefs, doesn't help much. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Pronin & Kugler (2010) found:
People evaluated their own decisions & life events as less predictable than similar decisions & life events of others, presumably reflecting higher self-centered free will attribution.

A replication team paper I played a small part in just published: Mostly successful.

I was very struck by this new Moss et al. theory about why people sometimes endorse moral relativism

Just wanted to say a little more to bring out what is so deep and interesting about their new idea

Want to hear something funny? Yeah, me neither. But it's out of my control: My book, Understanding The Nature-Nurture Debate, was released today. Not today, but I hope everyone will forgive me if I write a little about it over the next few weeks.
www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

A better way to map the election - The Boston Globe Researchers have found that adding nuance to the way we represent voting results on election night could help combat polarization and voter apathy.

Ahead of tomorrow's election, I published a piece in the BOSTON GLOBE based on our research showing that gradient maps—unlike typical red-blue maps—reduce perceived polarization and empower voters by making them feel their vote has a greater impact.
www.bostonglobe.com/2024/11/03/o...

🚨 NEW STUDY!!🚨 Sharing our latest paper published in JAMA Network Open:
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

"Public Attitudes, Interests, and Concerns Regarding Polygenic Embryo Screening"

I share some thoughts on the findings in Harvard Medical School's news release:
hms.harvard.edu/news/study-r...

Red and blue states: dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence - Cognitive Res... In the United States the color red has come to represent the Republican party, and blue the Democratic party, in maps of voting patterns. Here we test the hypothesis that voting maps dichotomized into...

The first study looks at election maps: "Red and blue states: dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence" by @remyfurrer.bsky.social , @kbschloss.bsky.social, @glupyan.bsky.social, @pniedent.bsky.social, @adriennewood.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1186/s412...

Coverage of our research demonstrating that "dichotomized maps mislead and reduce perceived voting influence" + More dataviz studies related to politics in the journal from the data visualization society

Deviating from a preregistration can be justified if it leads to a test with higher validity - even if this comes at the cost of a less severe test (which is likely still more severe than if you had not preregistered). I give examples in Table 1.

Psychology research tells us that uncertainty resolution is a strong motive that can at times drive us to seek useless and even harmful information, how useful is this technology for traits and how is it being marketed to consumers?

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

A select few of the many potential psychosocial concerns to consider: Given that the effects of embryo selection for traits are so small, will parental genetic expectancies - formed based on this information - have a greater influence on the child's development? www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Clinician and patient attitudes towards PES:

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Public attitudes towards polygenic embryo screening (PES):
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...