No, this is an unmitigated triumph. It's amazing how people take such a negative view of this.
We're are looking at this in different context and are using different baselines.
You are talking about how long ago we started with the genetic component of intelligence being malicious fantasies of evil people and now it's just science. Sure (though you still can't discuss it publicly). I'm talking about this particular paper and how big of a step it is compared to, say, a couple of years ago.
My baseline is much more narrow and technical. It is "we look at the the genome of a baby and have no idea what will be its IQ when it grows up". That is still largely the case and the paper's ability to forecast does not look impressive to me.
The fact that intelligence is largely genetic and highly polygenic is already "normal" for me -- my attitude is "yeah, sure, we know this, what have you done for me lately".
I appreciate the historical context which we are not free of by any stretch of imagination (so, no, I don't see unmitigated triumphs), but I was not commenting on progress over the last half a century. I want out-of-sample predictions with noticeable magnitude and I think getting there will take a bit more than just engineering.
My baseline is much more narrow and technical. It is "we look at the the genome of a baby and have no idea what will be its IQ when it grows up". That is still largely the case and the paper's ability to forecast does not look impressive to me.
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 ...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one.
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.