You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

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

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (295)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

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.