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Azathoth123 comments on Open thread, September 8-14, 2014 - Less Wrong
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This paper validates the approach (something a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons, were skeptical of), and even on its own merits we still get some predictive power out of it: the 3 top hits cover a range of ~1.5 points, and the 69 variants with 90% confidence predict even more. (I'm not sure how much since they don't bother to use all their data, but if we assume the 69 are evenly distributed between 0-0.5 points, then the mean is 0.25 and the total predictive power is more than a few points.)
What use is this result? Well, what use is a new-born baby? As the cryptographers say, 'attacks only get better'.
And, uh, why would you think that? There's no secret sauce here. Just take a lot of samples and run a regression. I don't think they even used anything particularly complex like a lasso or elastic net.
Keep in mind that the outside view of biological complexity is that
Or to phrase this another way:
I don't think the outside view is relevant here. We have coming up on a century of twin studies and behavioral genetics and very motivated people coming up with possibilities for problems, and so far the traditional estimates are looking pretty good: for example, when people go and look at genetics directly, the estimates for simple additive heritability look very similar to the traditional estimates. The other day offered an example of a SNP study confirming the estimates from twin studies, "Substantial SNP-based heritability estimates for working memory performance", Vogler et al 2014. If all these complexities were real and serious problems and the Outside View advises us to be skeptical, why do we keep finding the SNP/GCTA estimates look exactly like we would have predicted?
Ok, I confess I have no idea what SNP and GCTA are. As for the study Lumifer linked to, Razib Khan's analysis of it is that it suggests intelligence is a complex polygenetic trait. This should not be surprising as it is certainly an extremely complex trait in terms of phenotype.