Hans Fredrik Sunde
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hfsunde.bsky.social
Hans Fredrik Sunde
@hfsunde.bsky.social
560 followers 190 following 120 posts
Researcher at the Centre for Fertility and Health (NIPH) in Oslo. Interested in assortative mating, behavioral genetics, and bias in research.
www.hansfredriksunde.com
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hfsunde.bsky.social
Hans Fredrik Sunde @hfsunde.bsky.social · Jun 11
Last week, our new paper on indirect assortative mating was published.🍾 Let’s take a closer look at what this means, why it matters, and what we found (🧵/32):

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
hfsunde.bsky.social
👀
loic-yengo.bsky.social loic-yengo.bsky.social @loic-yengo.bsky.social · 7d
First time on Bsky and first big announcement!

I am excited to announce that our new study explaining the missing heritability of many phenotypes using WGS data from ~347,000 UK Biobank participants has just been published in @Nature.

Our manuscript is here: www.nature.com/articles/s41....
Estimation and mapping of the missing heritability of human phenotypes - Nature
WGS data were used from 347,630 individuals with European ancestry in the UK Biobank to obtain high-precision estimates of coding and non-coding rare variant heritability for 34 co...
www.nature.com
November 12, 2025 at 7:03 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
hansonmark.bsky.social
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision. A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year. The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
November 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
briannosek.bsky.social
Ouch
November 6, 2025 at 2:31 AM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
rosacheesman.bsky.social
1/ 🚨New paper in Nature Genetics

Genetic factors are associated with the educational fields people study, from arts to engineering.

Article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
FAQ: www.thehastingscenter.org/genomic-find...
Genetic associations with educational fields - Nature Genetics
Genome-wide analyses of 10 educational fields identify 17 associated loci. Analysis of genetic clustering across specializations identifies two key dimensions that show genetic overlap with personalit...
www.nature.com
November 4, 2025 at 10:23 AM
hfsunde.bsky.social
Better schools can compensate for dispositions
rosacheesman.bsky.social Rosa Cheesman @rosacheesman.bsky.social · 22d
Interdisciplinary paper with @paulhufe.net Astrid Sandsør and Nicolai Borgen now out in PNAS!
www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

Causal evidence of gene-environment interaction for reading test scores based on:
🧬 Exogenous within-family genetic differences
🏫 Exogenous variation in school value added
The genetic lottery goes to school: Better schools compensate for the effects of students’ genetic differences
www.pnas.org
October 29, 2025 at 7:58 AM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
ludvigdb.bsky.social
Excited to share this work led by @cktamnes.bsky.social (and featuring many colleagues from PROMENTA at @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social) exploring the links between psychological wellbeing and illbeing across biological, developmental, societal and intervention perspectives
October 16, 2025 at 3:55 PM
hfsunde.bsky.social
Very cool!
October 14, 2025 at 8:53 AM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
New blog post!

Let's say you have two measures meant to capture the same confounder. They're highly correlated. Can you still proceed with your regression analysis?

(I admit, the title is a bit of a spoiler)

www.the100.ci/2025/10/13/i...
If you have two measures of the same confounder, you can just include both of them in your regression model
Sometimes, researchers worry about multicollinearity in situations where it’s actually a non-issue. Here’s one such scenario. Imagine a situation where you are interested in the effect of X on Y (X...
www.the100.ci
October 13, 2025 at 1:14 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
eivindy.bsky.social
Two birds of a gene - catch Matt Keller's webinar at @uio.no on October 15th. Please share
www.sv.uio.no/promenta/eng...
@ispg.bsky.social @behaviorgenetic.bsky.social @unioslo-svfak.bsky.social @essgn.bsky.social @ibg.colorado.edu
Using structural equation models to estimate direct and indirect genetic effects and assortative mating in trio data - PROMENTA
Guest lecture by Matt Keller
www.sv.uio.no
October 5, 2025 at 11:11 AM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
chelseaparlett.bsky.social
It’s not the method that makes you causal it’s the assumptions
October 4, 2025 at 3:52 AM
hfsunde.bsky.social
PsyPost did a piece on our recent study on assortative mating. Check out the full paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
October 1, 2025 at 1:36 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
ruben.the100.ci
Our fragmentation paper is now finally out! I put some of the dumb quips that didn't make the cut in the alt texts.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
A fragmented field. If we conceive of the constructs and concepts studied in behavioral science as a map, we would find that it is highly fragmented and directions are hard to come by. Scientists can hardly stand on each others' shoulders if they cannot manage to meet on common ground. Fragmentation has worsened, not decreased, as the field has grown. Partly, this happens because we have too many reverse Columbuses, who, in search of prestige, set out to find a new continent, but just end up renaming India. But partly, we face a real, solvable search problem when trying to connect our fuzzy constructs and flexible measures. Most measures are used only once. To be clear, we do not want to prevent or reduce refinements of existing constructs and measures. Revisions, translations, and other refinements can contribute to a more coherent, organized literature and improve measurement. We are most concerned with the measures conceived with limited planning and released into the literature without much commitment or much of a life expectancy. In ontologies, these are sometimes referred to as “orphan nodes.”
September 29, 2025 at 10:37 AM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
rjhfmstr.bsky.social
🚨 New preprint out!
We reconstructed parental haplotypes in >440k individuals (UK & Estonian biobanks) to estimate assortative mating directly in the parental generation.
This reveals intensified assortment in recent generations.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
September 26, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
dr-appie.bsky.social
The largest study on late life virginity, based on >400k individuals, out now in @pnas.org

Open access link: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Shoutout to shared first author @laurawesseldijk.bsky.social ❤️

Thread below 👇🏽
September 16, 2025 at 8:26 PM
hfsunde.bsky.social
I tried making a figure explaining how the sum of variances law can be understood as the diagonal of a bivariate normal, and how a correlation between the two antecedent variables — such as under assortative mating — will result in greater variance and more cases above a threshold.
September 10, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
hfsunde.bsky.social
First, it is important to note that “assortative mating” is not synonymous with “partner similarity”. Instead, assortment is only one of several processes that can lead to partner similarity, the others being convergence, stratification, and inbreeding.
June 11, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
thomaskleppesto.bsky.social
We have a new paper out, led by the great @hfsunde.bsky.social! We find that the correlation between parental income and offspring mental disorders may be partly causal in adolescence (phenotypic transmission), but that it is largely explained by passive genetic transmission in adulthood.
hfsunde.bsky.social Hans Fredrik Sunde @hfsunde.bsky.social · Aug 4
Our new paper is out today! 🎉 In it, we use administrative register data to document how psychiatric disorders are strongly linked to parental income, from childhood far into adulthood. Furthermore, we attempt to separate causation and selection using kinship-based models.
doi.org/10.1111/jcpp...
August 7, 2025 at 5:33 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
hfsunde.bsky.social
Accompanying the paper is an interactive web page with figures and tables showing the prevalence of psychological codes in the ICPC-2 by age, sex, and parental income quartile. Check it out here:
hfsu.shinyapps.io/prevalence_b...
August 4, 2025 at 8:45 PM
hfsunde.bsky.social
Our new paper is out today! 🎉 In it, we use administrative register data to document how psychiatric disorders are strongly linked to parental income, from childhood far into adulthood. Furthermore, we attempt to separate causation and selection using kinship-based models.
doi.org/10.1111/jcpp...
August 4, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
denizfraemke.bsky.social
🚨📜 Debut publication alert!

Do genetics influence education differently across state borders? 🧬📚 We tested differences in genetic associations with education in East and West 🇩🇪 around reunification!

Out now in Psychological Science 👉 doi.org/10.1177/0956...

#Sociogenomics #MPRGBiosocial #MPIB

A🧵
July 15, 2025 at 9:32 AM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
evoroseman.bsky.social
A must-read piece by @sashagusevposts.bsky.social

I'll be That Guy™ and point out that this is why highly distributed pedigrees are used in evolution and animal breeding in nonexperimental settings. Sibs alone (esp. twins) give bad estimates. Good to see human gen getting on board.
sashagusevposts.bsky.social Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · Jul 12
I wrote a little bit about a cool recent paper looking at heritability estimates from very large registry data, and how we still really don't understand why outcomes track in families. A short 🧵:
We still do not understand family resemblance
...
theinfinitesimal.substack.com
July 12, 2025 at 3:18 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
tabeasch.bsky.social
🚨New preprint is out!

How do genetic effects on complex traits change with age? In this work, we compare different approaches to obtain age-varying genetic effects, and show how design and modeling choices can impact the conclusions we draw.
shorturl.at/17snd
A thread 🧵👇
Design and model choices shape inference of age-varying genetic effects on complex traits
Understanding how genetic influences on complex traits change with age is a fundamental question in genetic epidemiology. Both cross-sectional (between-subject) and longitudinal (within-subject) appro...
shorturl.at
July 8, 2025 at 12:47 PM
hfsunde.bsky.social
Sasha writes about our new study (led by bluesky-less Nikolai Eftedal) where we show how simple genetic models don't adequately fit correlations between multiple types of relatives. The mismatch between observed and expected correlations are interesting, which are explained well in his blog post:
sashagusevposts.bsky.social Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · Jul 12
I wrote a little bit about a cool recent paper looking at heritability estimates from very large registry data, and how we still really don't understand why outcomes track in families. A short 🧵:
We still do not understand family resemblance
...
theinfinitesimal.substack.com
July 12, 2025 at 5:25 PM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
sashagusevposts.bsky.social
I wrote a little bit about a cool recent paper looking at heritability estimates from very large registry data, and how we still really don't understand why outcomes track in families. A short 🧵:
We still do not understand family resemblance
...
theinfinitesimal.substack.com
July 12, 2025 at 2:25 AM
Reposted by Hans Fredrik Sunde
selimsametoglu.bsky.social
We have a new preprint: this work is especially dear to my heart, as it results from the data collection pipeline we established at the Netherlands Twin Register, which enabled us to collect Facebook posts and likes (paid for with plenty of blood, sweat, and tears...)
osf.io/preprints/ps...
OSF
osf.io
July 11, 2025 at 10:31 AM