Florian Privé

Find me here in the future: researcher & data scientist in statistical human genetics @AarhusUni

[Florian Privé @privefl]

I guess I'll be here in the future:
https://t.co/voNyn0Ax1S

[George Monbiot @GeorgeMonbiot]

This is my farewell post. I am not deleting this account, as I don’t want to lose the archive, and I don’t want my name taken by imposters. But, for as long as Musk owns the platform, I’ll no longer use it. I’m now posting at https://t.co/0iVBaQEKGy.

Since Elon Musk bought this site, he has transformed it from one on which millions could converse as equals into his personal megaphone. Now the world’s richest man uses it to wage his class war, transferring blame for the ills of capitalism onto vulnerable minorities, boosting the grimmest and most antisocial accounts while suppressing the humane voices with whom he disagrees.

He has used X not only to subvert the election for the US presidency, but to create a role for himself in US politics which, though he has never stood for election and would not be eligible, grants him immense power over the citizens of that nation. This site has been used as a tool to help replace democracy with oligarchy.

Musk claimed, on purchasing the platform, to be a “free speech absolutist”. He is in fact a prolific censor, suspending dissenting accounts and using lawsuits to shut down free speech, while employing an algorithm to increase the reach of his own posts 1,000-fold. He cannot abide a level playing field.

He has permitted or encouraged the growth of a ghost army of bots and trolls to degrade the experience of all who disagree with him. Their task is not just to abuse opponents but, perhaps more importantly, to drown intelligent conversation with a tsunami of stupidity. They respond to data with denial, expertise with execration, insight with insult, humour with hatred and thinking with thuggery. They suck the meaning out of everything. The stupidity trends in one direction: in the service of economic power. It is a weapon used to suppress the possibility of a better world.

Many years ago, when I lived in Brazil, I learnt that the military dictatorship had actively sought to suppress educational levels in schools, as it saw a well-informed population as a political threat. A confused, distracted and ignorant population is easy to manipulate. Now this counter-educational model is being rolled out worldwide, and Elon Musk is its primary sponsor.

I stayed here long after I first considered leaving, as I believed it was wrong to cede the ground to an oligarch and his minions. But I came to see that those of us who do not subscribe to Musk’s grim project are being used as groundbait: stimulating the feeding frenzy of 15-minute, 24-hour hate that now powers this platform. We can no longer build anything of value here. Brute force – the unmediated power of money – has beaten humanity, intelligence, humour and democracy.

On Bluesky I can be the person I want to be, a better person than I am on X, where it is almost impossible not to get dragged into the mud. I feel I can be understood because I am not confronting a deliberate effort to misunderstand me. So I can speak more quietly.

There is no guarantee that Bluesky will not also one day be monetised by its owners or captured by self-serving billionaires. But for now it remains a place in which interesting and enjoyable conversations can be had, kindness can be shown to strangers and a better world can be imagined. I hope to see you there.

[Qiongshi Lu @Q_StatGen]

Our paper on misleading biases in AD GWAS-by-proxy is published @NatureGenet. We identify the source of biases and explore strategies to reduce them @yy_stat @SunZhongxuan
Paper📰: https://t.co/Xdq51wVBw6
Software🧑‍💻: https://t.co/564QCMFIEV
Sumstats⬇️: https://t.co/0LJOblAgxj

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@mblum_g @felbalazard

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@pp0196 No hyper-parameter I think.
I just need to find a good way to choose the number of groups.

[Florian Privé @privefl]

Automatic detection of ancestry groups based on PCA.

How useful do you think this is?

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@pp0196 The goal would be to get ancestry proportions from automatic ancestry groups, based on PCA.

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@pp0196 I guess PCA is not much sensitive to those, so it should be fine.

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@pp0196 It is deterministic, if that's your question.

If you meant whether I get the same results when e.g. subsetting, I'll need to test on some larger dataset.

[Timothy Raben @TimothyRaben]

The UK Biobank (UKB) has been an amazing field changing resource for the past decade. Unfortunately, and very suddenly, they have decided that to work with their data you now *must* use their “Research Analysis Platform” (RAP). @uk_biobank I guess there have been general warning

[Naomi Wray @WrayNaomi]

New Oxford-Aarhus-Copenhagen collaboration - not yet launched - 2 postdocs, 2 senior postdocs and postdoc coordinator in Oxford. Jobs 173031-3 at https://t.co/8li4H2wags Methods-focussed in group Holmes, Visscher, Evans, Nicholson, @cwcyau, @ten_photo etc, Denmark ads soon

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@mblum_g .
@antuki13 devrait savoir

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@Rbn_Hfmstr I guess, if you have this, you can also report the r2(G_bgen, G_wgs) for each variant in the bgen data?
This is really what I am looking for.

[Florian Privé @privefl]

Has anyone checked the consistency between the imputed dosage (BGEN) data from the UK Biobank vs the new sequencing data?

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@AlexTISYoung Then we should talk :-)

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@elonmuskADO No. Twitter.

[Florian Privé @privefl]

@ShaiCarmi Or by inferring the ancestry proportions of each individual using https://t.co/e4MQnPb9Zr (where AJ is one of the 21 ancestry groups for which proportions are reported).

[Florian Privé @privefl]

I visited them a few weeks ago; great team!

[Florian Privé @privefl]

Just registered ✅

[Doug Speed @dougthespeed]

EMGM 2024 will take place at the the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria 3-4 April. I am super excited that I get to present, as well as some excellent speakers. Visit https://t.co/Ywlb9XowCk for more details; abstracts open until 15 March!

[Florian Privé @privefl]

"Benchmarking of local genetic correlation estimation
methods using summary statistics from genome-wide
association studies" -- https://t.co/bwFYbHud3s

Very nice *external* comparison of 3 sumstats methods for inferring local genetic correlations.
- ρ-hess, SUPERNOVA and LAVA -