Lumifer comments on Open thread, September 8-14, 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: polymathwannabe 08 September 2014 12:31PM

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Comment author: Lumifer 11 September 2014 05:11:32PM 3 points [-]

There's no secret sauce here. Just take a lot of samples and run a regression.

Pretend for a second it's a nutrition study and apply your usual scepticism :-) You know quite well that "just run a regression" is, um... rarely that simple.

To give one obvious example, interaction effects are an issue, including interaction between genes and the environment.

Comment author: gwern 11 September 2014 11:10:44PM *  8 points [-]

Pretend for a second it's a nutrition study and apply your usual scepticism :-) You know quite well that "just run a regression" is, um... rarely that simple.

No, that's the great thing about genetic associations! First, genes don't change over a lifetime, so every association is in effect a longitudinal study where the arrow of time immediately rules out A<-B or reverse causation in which IQ somehow causes particular variants to be overrepresented; that takes out one of the three causal pathways. Then you're left with confounding - but there's almost no way for a third variable to pick out people with particular alleles and grant them higher intelligence, no greenbeard effect, and population differences are dealt with by using relatively homogenous samples & controlling for principal components - so you don't have to worry much about A<-C->B. So all you're left with is A->B.

To give one obvious example, interaction effects are an issue, including interaction between genes and the environment.

But they're not. They're not a large part of what's going on. And they don't affect the associations you find through a straight analysis looking for additive effects.

Comment author: Lumifer 12 September 2014 12:46:32AM 3 points [-]

genes don't change over a lifetime

But their expression does.

They're not a large part of what's going on.

How do you know?

Comment author: gwern 14 September 2014 09:37:12PM 1 point [-]

But their expression does.

An expression in circumstances dictated by what genes one started with.

How do you know?

Because if they were a large part of what was going on, the estimates would not break down cleanly and the methods work so well.