2 ms·

An anecdote to go along with his rejection. Once I got rejected from doing a medical donation in US because in the giant table of family sicknesses they gave me

An anecdote to go along with his rejection. Once I got rejected from doing a medical donation in US because in the giant table of family sicknesses they gave me I marked X next to one of the mental conditions for my father who was an alcoholic because apparently alcoholism technically is that kind of mental condition (yes, the X had to be explained in the form, which I did). As you can imagine alcoholism is not that heritable, and had more to do with the environment (I grew up in Russia where it was extremely prevalent), but for the clerks an X is an X.

gwern 3y ago
> As you can imagine alcoholism is not that heritable Alcoholism is that heritable: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4345133/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4345133/ At ~50% heritability, it is in no way unusually low, and entirely comparable with many other traits.
- lostmsu 3y ago
  This is actually more heritable than appendicitis or leukemia. Hard to imagine what the mechanism could be.
  - gwern 3y ago
    Mechanism(s), it's going to be highly polygenic & mediated through many pathways. I don't see it as needing to be any more inherently mysterious than appendicitis: it's all cells doing very complicated chemical stuff in long causal pathways, in the end. 'Appendicitis' need be no more 'direct' or 'simple' than 'alcoholism'. For example, I expect that I have a very low genetic risk for alcoholism - no family history, and drinking more alcohol than a beer or two makes me miserably depressed. There is surely some sort of neurochemical explanation there, something something GABA depressive neurotransmitter positive reinforcement of alcohol-avoidance behavior yadda yadda, but the net effect is the same: I'm not going to become an alcoholic. If you could trace it out, it's not going to look any more mysterious than some appendicitis explanation starting with an immune-modulating SNP affecting T-cells modifying risk of random hepatitis virus infecting the appendix and triggering an autoimmune reaction... or whatever it is that is between 'SNP variant #123' and 'developed appendicitis at age 14'. It's all cause-and-effect, atoms-and-void, in the end.

gwern 3y ago

> As you can imagine alcoholism is not that heritable Alcoholism is that heritable: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4345133/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4345133/ At ~50% heritability, it is in no way unusually low, and entirely comparable with many other traits.

lostmsu 3y ago
This is actually more heritable than appendicitis or leukemia. Hard to imagine what the mechanism could be.
- gwern 3y ago
  Mechanism(s), it's going to be highly polygenic & mediated through many pathways. I don't see it as needing to be any more inherently mysterious than appendicitis: it's all cells doing very complicated chemical stuff in long causal pathways, in the end. 'Appendicitis' need be no more 'direct' or 'simple' than 'alcoholism'. For example, I expect that I have a very low genetic risk for alcoholism - no family history, and drinking more alcohol than a beer or two makes me miserably depressed. There is surely some sort of neurochemical explanation there, something something GABA depressive neurotransmitter positive reinforcement of alcohol-avoidance behavior yadda yadda, but the net effect is the same: I'm not going to become an alcoholic. If you could trace it out, it's not going to look any more mysterious than some appendicitis explanation starting with an immune-modulating SNP affecting T-cells modifying risk of random hepatitis virus infecting the appendix and triggering an autoimmune reaction... or whatever it is that is between 'SNP variant #123' and 'developed appendicitis at age 14'. It's all cause-and-effect, atoms-and-void, in the end.