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The primary effect that reading this had on me was the change in state from [owning a cloak hadn't occurred to me] to [owning a cloak sounds awesome; i am unhappy that i hadn't thought of it on my own]
The definition of 'heritable' being underspecified (since you have to specify what population of environments you're considering) is not the same as being incoherent.
I agree. Good point.
So most of what you have written makes sense but there are some major issues with some parts.
heritability (a term that has an incoherent definition)
Can you expand on what you think about the definition is incoherent? This is a pretty standard term.
the whole gene vs. environment discussion is obsolete, in light of the findings of the past decade. Everything is gene-environment interaction.
The fact that many genes interact in a complicated way with the environment is not newly discovered. It doesn't change the fact that in some contexts genes or environment can matter more or less. For example, if one has a gene that codes for some form of mental retardation, in most cases, environment can't change that. (I say in most cases because there are a few exceptions especially related to issues related to trace nutrients or to bad reactions to specific compounds). Similarly, if someone has severe lead poisoning they are going to have pretty bad problems regardless of what the genes the person has.
The first two points you made while roughly valid connect to a more general issue- yes these studies have flaws, but just because a technique has flaws doesn't mean we can't use it to learn (especially when in this context the issues you bring up are well known to the researchers).
The answer to the question "what proportion of phenotypic variability is due to genetic variability?" always has the same answer: "it depends!" What population of environments are you doing this calculation over? A trait can go from close to 0% heritable to close to 100% heritable, depending on the range of environments in the sample. That's a definition problem. Further, what should we count as 'genetic'? Gene expression can depend on the environment of the parents, for example (DNA methylation, etc). That's an environmental inheritance. I just think there is an old way of talking about these things that needs to go away in light of current knowledge.
I agree with you that we still can learn a lot from these studies.
In response to
Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids
Adoption studies are biased toward the null of no parenting effect, because adoptive parents aren't randomly selected from the population of potential parents (they often are screened to be similar to biological parents).
Twin studies I think are particularly flawed when it comes to estimating heritability (a term that has an incoherent definition). Twins have a shared pre-natal environment. In some cases, they even share a placenta.
Plus, the whole gene vs. environment discussion is obsolete, in light of the findings of the past decade. Everything is gene-environment interaction.
In response to
Rational Toothpaste: A Case Study
wait, this isn't well done satire?
Informed consent bias in RCTs?
The problem of published research findings not being reliable has been discussed here before.
One problem with RCTs that has received little attention is that, due to informed consent laws and ethical considerations, subjects are aware that they might be receiving sham therapy. This differs from the environment outside of the research setting, where people are confident that whatever their doctor prescribes is what they will get from their pharmacist. I can imagine many ways in which subjects' uncertainty about treatment assignment could affect outcomes (adherence is one possible mechanism). I wrote a short paper about this, focusing out what we would ideally estimate if we could lie to subjects, versus what we actually can estimate in RCTs (link). Here is the abstract:
It is widely recognized that traditional randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have limited generalizability due to the numerous ways in which conditions of RCTs differ from those experienced each day by patients and physicians. As a result, there has been a recent push towards pragmatic trials that better mimic real-world conditions. One way in which RCTs differ from normal everyday experience is that all patients in the trial have uncertainty about what treatment they were assigned. Outside of the RCT setting, if a patient is prescribed a drug then there is no reason for them to wonder if it is a placebo. Uncertainty about treatment assignment could affect both treatment and placebo response. We use a potential outcomes approach to define relevant causal effects based on combinations of treatment assignment and belief about treatment assignment. We show that traditional RCTs are designed to estimate a quantity that is typically not of primary interest. We propose a new study design that has the potential to provide information about a wider range of interesting causal effects
Any thoughts on this? Is this a trivial technical issue or something worth addressing?
In response to
Ethics and rationality of suicide
I can't recall the name of it, but I think there was documentary about people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The filmmakers interviewed a bunch of people who had survived their attempts, and most or all of them regretted jumping as soon as they were airborne. I'm in favor of a right to suicide (not to be confused with thinking it is a good idea in the vast majority of cases) but I think anyone who is really set on going through with it should be encouraged to do so by means of a slow-acting poison that has an antidote, or some analogous method, just in case they discover an unexpected revealed preference for living after beginning to kill themselves.
"The Bridge". There was one person who survived and said he changed his mind once he was airborne. My recollection of the movie is that most of the people who jumped had been wanting to die for most of their lives. Even their family members seemed at peace with it for that reason.
In response to
Rationality Quotes: December 2010
You have to realize that a great number of things are discussed in these proceedings that the mind just can't deal with, people are simply too tired and distracted, and by way of compensation they resort to superstition.
-- Kafka, The Trial
In response to
Rationality Quotes: November 2010
Justice is an artefact of custom. Where customs are unsettled its dictates soon become dated. Ideas of justice are as timeless as fashions in hats.
-John Gray, Straw Dogs
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I feel like this creates more misconceptions than it clears up. It's very dismissive of something that is really in the early phases of being studied.