11 ms·

Genetic data from over 20k U.S. children misused for 'race science'

40 points by DustinEchoes 8mo ago

https://archive.ph/ZavpU https://archive.ph/ZavpU

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
terminalshort 8mo ago
I can't take any of this seriously so long as any research on race and intelligence continues to be banned as heresy rather than being discussed scientifically.
- 762236 8mo ago
  Totally agree.
- conception 8mo ago
  For one the idea of race is a social, not scientific, construct. It doesn’t mean anything scientifically.
  - blargthorwars 8mo ago
    Some medicines work better or worse depending on race. Based on the scientific methodology, your statement is incorrect.
  - terminalshort 8mo ago
    You are a perfect example of what I am talking about. That is an obvious lie. Of course it means something scientifically because it refers to a genetic grouping. e.g. black people are much more likely to have the genetic disease sickle cell anemia. Nobody seems to have much of a problem with that statement but if it were a gene related to intelligence you people would lose your minds. If it isn't a scientifically valid concept, then why did the NIH label the genetic data by race?
    - just_once 8mo ago
      Would you feel better if people said "people of African descent are much more likely to have a genetic disease sickle cell anemia"?
    - amanaplanacanal 8mo ago
      The problem here is that "black" can mean anybody with dark skin from anywhere in the world. The sickle cell stuff is likely related to the fact that most "black" people in the US are descended from slaves that pretty much all came from the same small region in West Africa.
      - terminalshort 8mo ago
        My point here is that this problem only seems to be brought up when the research has to do with intelligence. If you talk about genetic differences between "black," "white," or any other racial grouping on any other metric nobody ever brings it up as in my example above. So, while I acknowledge the fundamental weaknesses of the category, I have to conclude that the real objection here isn't the categories, but the topic of the research.
        just_once 8mo ago
        Most of the examples that you've used gain very little from added specificity. It's essentially linguistic laziness. That linguistic laziness is not identically consequential in all contexts.
    - dragonwriter 8mo ago
      Races are not genetic groupings, they are social constructs whose boundaries evolve over time, which is particularly clear when they are formalized in a way which resista change and that formalization drifts increasingly far from the current common usage, such as the way the White racial category in common usage in America currently roughly corresponds to the the subset of the White racial category that excludes the Hispanic ethnicity in the US Census categorization. The construction of race at any given time and place will tend to have non-zero correlation with genetic frequencies, in part by chance and in part because it is usually largely (but not entirely) drivn by appearance which is to some degree associated with some aspects of underlying genetics. > e.g. black people are much more likely to have the genetic disease sickle cell anemia. People with ancestry in sub-Saharan Africa (and within that, even more West Africa), India, the Middle East, and Mediterranean are more likely to have the gene that provides malaria resistance with one copy and sickle cell disease with two than other populations. While the highest incidence group is also commonly “Black” in most constructions of race, a lot of the American perception of it as a nearly exclusively Black disease is because the population perceived as Black in the US is heavily drawn from West Africa, and the US population also underrepresents other populations in which it is more common than average AND does not include, and may not construct as Black, populations constructed as Black elsewhere in the world where it is not common.
- amarcheschi 8mo ago
  The person in question in the article is kirkegaard, you should not take seriously what he does anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity_Foundation edit since i was feeling really daring today i found an old archived page of a wiki holding a lot of interesting thoughts from him, such as eugenics to prevent the loss of western civilization, and other points that at this point you should imagine. link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250416005529/https:/rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard https://web.archive.org/web/20250416005529/https:/rationalwi...
  - inshard 8mo ago
    Interesting comparing these two entries: https://grokipedia.com/page/OpenPsych https://grokipedia.com/page/OpenPsych https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych
    - amarcheschi 8mo ago
      the entire microuniverse of some rationalist/pseudoscience groups feeling really "rational" and then having racist, sexist, (insert -ist or -ism here) views is a bit of a joke at this point
  - terminalshort 8mo ago
    This criticism seems to mostly be that he is associated with bad people who say naughty things. Maybe he is a bad scientist, but where are all the well designed scientific studies that show his conclusions are wrong? That's what I care about, but they don't exist because you would never get funding and even to propose running such a study would be career suicide.
- rf15 8mo ago
  Yeah I agree, considering how much my black kid is beating all the other white kids intellectually. Good to know you know your place. /s
- bryanlarsen 8mo ago
  Race is not a genetic concept, it's social. Or more accurately, if it were genetic the races would look very different. The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined. So you have two choices: 1. Everybody is black. 2. The other races roughly stand, but there are dozens of different black races. Or you can be more accurate and say race is cultural.
  - hubber 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - terminalshort 8mo ago
    OK, then let's do it right. But I think you know that isn't really the issue here. Nobody is putting out studies on correctly defined races by genetic groupings and intelligence either because the topic is still considered heresy. Your point that the commonly used definition of race is inaccurate is simply deflecting from this fact.
    - yed 8mo ago
      The point is there is no such thing as a “correct” grouping. The choice of what constitutes a group is completely subjective, it all depends on how far you choose to zoom in or out.
      - terminalshort 8mo ago
        There absolutely are correct and incorrect ways of partitioning data into groups. Human genetics is no exception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup
        yed 8mo ago
        There are correct ways to group but there is no correct group size. Clustering algorithms inherently require some choice of sensitivity. There is no single correct choice for a given set of data, it all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
- tptacek 8mo ago
  Well then I have good news for you: you can begin taking it seriously, because research on race and intelligence is an active field of research that is not suppressed and produces lots of papers --- in several different disciplines, including psychometrics (the Intelligence Journal people), behavioral genetics, and molecular genetics (the GWAS people).
rahimnathwani 8mo ago
It seems weird for the government to collect data useful for research, but then to gate access based on the viewpoints of potential users. This restriction doesn't support the search for truth. Whatever people think of Lasker (Cremieux) and his views, isn't data being available to all interested parties the best way to find the truth? The article mentions this towards the very end: Adam Candeub, the top lawyer at the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a law review article in 2024 criticizing the N.I.H.’s discouragement of stigmatizing research. He compared it to the persecution of Galileo. “A liberal society should support the search for truth,” Mr. Candeub wrote, “regardless of how uncomfortable and unsettling that truth turns out to be.”
- cyanydeez 8mo ago
  Paradox of intolerance answers your dilemma. Other answers: if placebos work, why would we restrict peoples choice and their dissemination? Because placebos rarely are innocent in often they become avoidant measures away from empirical science. Your view point is a local minimum in that you want to ignore societal impact. One of those impacts is using valid data to tout pseudoscientific methods. We know GIGO but the general populace does not You should use the samw logic ans find yourself arguing against vaccinea and herd immunity.
  - rahimnathwani 8mo ago
    The paradox of intolerance suggests we should (if all else fails) suppress those whose seek to suppress others. How is that relevant? Is Lasker seeking to (let alone succeeding at) suppressing voices that disagree with his own? He might not engage with his critics (e.g. David Bessis) but AFAICT he's not doing anything to suppress them.
    - cyanydeez 8mo ago
      Surely this time race science wont be used to make social policies that directly boil down to racism by visual difference.
hubber 8mo ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 8mo ago
  This is a category error. Our definition of "race" is, to the extent it's genetically constructed at all (it's at least as much social as genetic), based on a small, superficial subset of the whole genome, mostly selected ages ago in response to climate. The idea that the rest of the genome would be strongly correlated to these phenotypical traits is in fact the extraordinary claim; not only is there not extraordinary evidence for it, but the evidence we have is mostly countervailing.
  - hubber 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - tptacek 8mo ago
      This the "cold winters theory", popularized by the academic fraudster Richard Lynn (of "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" fame). It's a just-so story. You could tell the same story about the selective pressure for intelligence and problem-solving in hot climates; try to eat in the Kalahari sometime. Really, the more you think about that theory, the dumber it gets.
      - ajsishahhs 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        tptacek 8mo ago
        Maybe we can start earlier, like the invention of writing not occurring in Siberia.
      - hubber 8mo ago
        >You could tell the same story about the selective pressure for intelligence and problem-solving in hot climates You sure could! Why wouldn't you? Do you reject the concept of evolution via natural selection in all species or only humans?
justin66 8mo ago
Cringe: In a statement, Lyric Jorgenson, associate director of science policy at the N.I.H., said the agency had taken steps to protect the ABCD Study. It has introduced a new online portal requiring users to complete training on responsible data use and to “pass a knowledge test prior to accessing the data.” They have an online training and everything!
DeathArrow 8mo ago
The White House already committed to open-sourcing all such datasets: "(a) all federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust;"
dismalaf 8mo ago
> Jordan Lasker, who often writes about race and intelligence under the name Crémieux It's funny because this guy is center-left, he just happens to actually be intellectually honest. Anyhow, either we do science or we just admit that we don't like the social implications of the evidence. Trying to hide data and gaslight the public isn't science.
- bigbadfeline 8mo ago
  > Anyhow, either we do science or we just admit that we don't like the social implications of the evidence. Right, right... Rehabilitation of eugenics in 3, 2, 1... Nothing new here, Hitler did follow the "social implications of the evidence"... after all, a whole bunch of esteemed scientists and Nobel laureates hailed eugenics as the best thing after sliced white bread, Hitler did quite a bit of slicing of that material himself. No, he didn't invent his theory, he simply followed accepted science. > Trying to hide data and gaslight the public isn't science. There isn't much that resembles science in social academia, data isn't science and the prediction of the so-called "social" sciences have been disastrously wrong all along. Data isn't evidence ether - you have to have a theory within a science with a sound methodological foundation before you can treat data as evidence. We don't have that now and we've never had it, the few meager attempts were politicized and bastardized in their infancy. > It's funny because this guy is center-left, he just happens to actually be intellectually honest. Center-left? Like all Democrats in Congress who joined the fifty-odd Republicans to vote for letting the government remotely mess with your car while you drive? At the time of a real shooting war in the streets in Minneapolis they seized the opportunity to put some more shackles around public's ankles. There isn't left, right or center in US party politics - only Orwellian-left theater vs Orwellian-right theater in service of forces who view the public as sheep to be sheared.
  - terminalshort 8mo ago
    How, exactly, was Hitler following the science? Can you point to the specific scientific research that is to blame?
    - 8mo ago
DeathArrow 8mo ago
This seems to be one of the articles: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301904 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... And another one: http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2023.63.3.2 http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2023.63.3.2 And another one: https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr518324 https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr518324
rustyhancock 8mo ago
The simple answer is that Race science is pointless because race is not a clean objective concept. We are fooled by our remarkable capability to assign racial labels into thinking it must be simple to cleanly deduce race from a generic test. But it's obvious that races do have genetic differences. The way scientists resolve this conflict is to bypass race entirely. And focus on genetics. Genome wide association studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study) is the answer. You create statistical models from large caches of genetic data and find association's. Then you can provide a risk score for an individual and if you want estimates based on ethnicity. It's the genetic test that makes it useful like Duffy Null testing before starting people or African descent on Clozapine, HLA-B*1502 testing before starting Asians on Carbamazpine. Where risks are lower you can do crude heuristics like calcium channel blockers before ace inhibitors for black people. But just having people check a box in a questionnaire and doing their IQ is just pointless scientifically.
TMWNN 8mo ago
There was a 2018 op-ed in the Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...> by a geneticist, warning society that at that moment, and increasingly in the next few years, his field would find things about humans that people wouldn't like to hear. Things like, racial differences are real, intelligence is mostly inherited, etc. (Bonus: Men and women are different, and there are only two sexes.) The tone was not "these are breakthroughs to look forward to"; rather, "things are coming that people we disagree with are going to exploit, but they are nonetheless real". Another interpretation would be "please don't yell at us for discovering these things".
NedF 8mo ago
[dead]

40 points by DustinEchoes 8mo ago

https://archive.ph/ZavpU https://archive.ph/ZavpU

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

terminalshort 8mo ago

I can't take any of this seriously so long as any research on race and intelligence continues to be banned as heresy rather than being discussed scientifically.

762236 8mo ago
Totally agree.
conception 8mo ago
For one the idea of race is a social, not scientific, construct. It doesn’t mean anything scientifically.
- blargthorwars 8mo ago
  Some medicines work better or worse depending on race. Based on the scientific methodology, your statement is incorrect.
- terminalshort 8mo ago
  You are a perfect example of what I am talking about. That is an obvious lie. Of course it means something scientifically because it refers to a genetic grouping. e.g. black people are much more likely to have the genetic disease sickle cell anemia. Nobody seems to have much of a problem with that statement but if it were a gene related to intelligence you people would lose your minds. If it isn't a scientifically valid concept, then why did the NIH label the genetic data by race?
  - just_once 8mo ago
    Would you feel better if people said "people of African descent are much more likely to have a genetic disease sickle cell anemia"?
  - amanaplanacanal 8mo ago
    The problem here is that "black" can mean anybody with dark skin from anywhere in the world. The sickle cell stuff is likely related to the fact that most "black" people in the US are descended from slaves that pretty much all came from the same small region in West Africa.
    - terminalshort 8mo ago
      My point here is that this problem only seems to be brought up when the research has to do with intelligence. If you talk about genetic differences between "black," "white," or any other racial grouping on any other metric nobody ever brings it up as in my example above. So, while I acknowledge the fundamental weaknesses of the category, I have to conclude that the real objection here isn't the categories, but the topic of the research.
      - just_once 8mo ago
        Most of the examples that you've used gain very little from added specificity. It's essentially linguistic laziness. That linguistic laziness is not identically consequential in all contexts.
  - dragonwriter 8mo ago
    Races are not genetic groupings, they are social constructs whose boundaries evolve over time, which is particularly clear when they are formalized in a way which resista change and that formalization drifts increasingly far from the current common usage, such as the way the White racial category in common usage in America currently roughly corresponds to the the subset of the White racial category that excludes the Hispanic ethnicity in the US Census categorization. The construction of race at any given time and place will tend to have non-zero correlation with genetic frequencies, in part by chance and in part because it is usually largely (but not entirely) drivn by appearance which is to some degree associated with some aspects of underlying genetics. > e.g. black people are much more likely to have the genetic disease sickle cell anemia. People with ancestry in sub-Saharan Africa (and within that, even more West Africa), India, the Middle East, and Mediterranean are more likely to have the gene that provides malaria resistance with one copy and sickle cell disease with two than other populations. While the highest incidence group is also commonly “Black” in most constructions of race, a lot of the American perception of it as a nearly exclusively Black disease is because the population perceived as Black in the US is heavily drawn from West Africa, and the US population also underrepresents other populations in which it is more common than average AND does not include, and may not construct as Black, populations constructed as Black elsewhere in the world where it is not common.
amarcheschi 8mo ago
The person in question in the article is kirkegaard, you should not take seriously what he does anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Diversity_Foundation edit since i was feeling really daring today i found an old archived page of a wiki holding a lot of interesting thoughts from him, such as eugenics to prevent the loss of western civilization, and other points that at this point you should imagine. link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250416005529/https:/rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_O._W._Kirkegaard https://web.archive.org/web/20250416005529/https:/rationalwi...
- inshard 8mo ago
  Interesting comparing these two entries: https://grokipedia.com/page/OpenPsych https://grokipedia.com/page/OpenPsych https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych
  - amarcheschi 8mo ago
    the entire microuniverse of some rationalist/pseudoscience groups feeling really "rational" and then having racist, sexist, (insert -ist or -ism here) views is a bit of a joke at this point
- terminalshort 8mo ago
  This criticism seems to mostly be that he is associated with bad people who say naughty things. Maybe he is a bad scientist, but where are all the well designed scientific studies that show his conclusions are wrong? That's what I care about, but they don't exist because you would never get funding and even to propose running such a study would be career suicide.
rf15 8mo ago
Yeah I agree, considering how much my black kid is beating all the other white kids intellectually. Good to know you know your place. /s
bryanlarsen 8mo ago
Race is not a genetic concept, it's social. Or more accurately, if it were genetic the races would look very different. The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined. So you have two choices: 1. Everybody is black. 2. The other races roughly stand, but there are dozens of different black races. Or you can be more accurate and say race is cultural.
- hubber 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- terminalshort 8mo ago
  OK, then let's do it right. But I think you know that isn't really the issue here. Nobody is putting out studies on correctly defined races by genetic groupings and intelligence either because the topic is still considered heresy. Your point that the commonly used definition of race is inaccurate is simply deflecting from this fact.
  - yed 8mo ago
    The point is there is no such thing as a “correct” grouping. The choice of what constitutes a group is completely subjective, it all depends on how far you choose to zoom in or out.
    - terminalshort 8mo ago
      There absolutely are correct and incorrect ways of partitioning data into groups. Human genetics is no exception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup
      - yed 8mo ago
        There are correct ways to group but there is no correct group size. Clustering algorithms inherently require some choice of sensitivity. There is no single correct choice for a given set of data, it all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
tptacek 8mo ago
Well then I have good news for you: you can begin taking it seriously, because research on race and intelligence is an active field of research that is not suppressed and produces lots of papers --- in several different disciplines, including psychometrics (the Intelligence Journal people), behavioral genetics, and molecular genetics (the GWAS people).

rahimnathwani 8mo ago

It seems weird for the government to collect data useful for research, but then to gate access based on the viewpoints of potential users. This restriction doesn't support the search for truth. Whatever people think of Lasker (Cremieux) and his views, isn't data being available to all interested parties the best way to find the truth? The article mentions this towards the very end: Adam Candeub, the top lawyer at the Federal Communications Commission, wrote a law review article in 2024 criticizing the N.I.H.’s discouragement of stigmatizing research. He compared it to the persecution of Galileo. “A liberal society should support the search for truth,” Mr. Candeub wrote, “regardless of how uncomfortable and unsettling that truth turns out to be.”

cyanydeez 8mo ago
Paradox of intolerance answers your dilemma. Other answers: if placebos work, why would we restrict peoples choice and their dissemination? Because placebos rarely are innocent in often they become avoidant measures away from empirical science. Your view point is a local minimum in that you want to ignore societal impact. One of those impacts is using valid data to tout pseudoscientific methods. We know GIGO but the general populace does not You should use the samw logic ans find yourself arguing against vaccinea and herd immunity.
- rahimnathwani 8mo ago
  The paradox of intolerance suggests we should (if all else fails) suppress those whose seek to suppress others. How is that relevant? Is Lasker seeking to (let alone succeeding at) suppressing voices that disagree with his own? He might not engage with his critics (e.g. David Bessis) but AFAICT he's not doing anything to suppress them.
  - cyanydeez 8mo ago
    Surely this time race science wont be used to make social policies that directly boil down to racism by visual difference.

hubber 8mo ago

[flagged]

tptacek 8mo ago
This is a category error. Our definition of "race" is, to the extent it's genetically constructed at all (it's at least as much social as genetic), based on a small, superficial subset of the whole genome, mostly selected ages ago in response to climate. The idea that the rest of the genome would be strongly correlated to these phenotypical traits is in fact the extraordinary claim; not only is there not extraordinary evidence for it, but the evidence we have is mostly countervailing.
- hubber 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - tptacek 8mo ago
    This the "cold winters theory", popularized by the academic fraudster Richard Lynn (of "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" fame). It's a just-so story. You could tell the same story about the selective pressure for intelligence and problem-solving in hot climates; try to eat in the Kalahari sometime. Really, the more you think about that theory, the dumber it gets.
    - ajsishahhs 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - tptacek 8mo ago
        Maybe we can start earlier, like the invention of writing not occurring in Siberia.
    - hubber 8mo ago
      >You could tell the same story about the selective pressure for intelligence and problem-solving in hot climates You sure could! Why wouldn't you? Do you reject the concept of evolution via natural selection in all species or only humans?

justin66 8mo ago

Cringe: In a statement, Lyric Jorgenson, associate director of science policy at the N.I.H., said the agency had taken steps to protect the ABCD Study. It has introduced a new online portal requiring users to complete training on responsible data use and to “pass a knowledge test prior to accessing the data.” They have an online training and everything!

DeathArrow 8mo ago

The White House already committed to open-sourcing all such datasets: "(a) all federally funded health research should empower Americans through transparency and open-source data, and should avoid or eliminate conflicts of interest that skew outcomes and perpetuate distrust;"

dismalaf 8mo ago

> Jordan Lasker, who often writes about race and intelligence under the name Crémieux It's funny because this guy is center-left, he just happens to actually be intellectually honest. Anyhow, either we do science or we just admit that we don't like the social implications of the evidence. Trying to hide data and gaslight the public isn't science.

bigbadfeline 8mo ago
> Anyhow, either we do science or we just admit that we don't like the social implications of the evidence. Right, right... Rehabilitation of eugenics in 3, 2, 1... Nothing new here, Hitler did follow the "social implications of the evidence"... after all, a whole bunch of esteemed scientists and Nobel laureates hailed eugenics as the best thing after sliced white bread, Hitler did quite a bit of slicing of that material himself. No, he didn't invent his theory, he simply followed accepted science. > Trying to hide data and gaslight the public isn't science. There isn't much that resembles science in social academia, data isn't science and the prediction of the so-called "social" sciences have been disastrously wrong all along. Data isn't evidence ether - you have to have a theory within a science with a sound methodological foundation before you can treat data as evidence. We don't have that now and we've never had it, the few meager attempts were politicized and bastardized in their infancy. > It's funny because this guy is center-left, he just happens to actually be intellectually honest. Center-left? Like all Democrats in Congress who joined the fifty-odd Republicans to vote for letting the government remotely mess with your car while you drive? At the time of a real shooting war in the streets in Minneapolis they seized the opportunity to put some more shackles around public's ankles. There isn't left, right or center in US party politics - only Orwellian-left theater vs Orwellian-right theater in service of forces who view the public as sheep to be sheared.
- terminalshort 8mo ago
  How, exactly, was Hitler following the science? Can you point to the specific scientific research that is to blame?
  - 8mo ago

DeathArrow 8mo ago

This seems to be one of the articles: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289619301904 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... And another one: http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2023.63.3.2 http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2023.63.3.2 And another one: https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr518324 https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr518324

rustyhancock 8mo ago

The simple answer is that Race science is pointless because race is not a clean objective concept. We are fooled by our remarkable capability to assign racial labels into thinking it must be simple to cleanly deduce race from a generic test. But it's obvious that races do have genetic differences. The way scientists resolve this conflict is to bypass race entirely. And focus on genetics. Genome wide association studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study) is the answer. You create statistical models from large caches of genetic data and find association's. Then you can provide a risk score for an individual and if you want estimates based on ethnicity. It's the genetic test that makes it useful like Duffy Null testing before starting people or African descent on Clozapine, HLA-B*1502 testing before starting Asians on Carbamazpine. Where risks are lower you can do crude heuristics like calcium channel blockers before ace inhibitors for black people. But just having people check a box in a questionnaire and doing their IQ is just pointless scientifically.

TMWNN 8mo ago

There was a 2018 op-ed in the Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...> by a geneticist, warning society that at that moment, and increasingly in the next few years, his field would find things about humans that people wouldn't like to hear. Things like, racial differences are real, intelligence is mostly inherited, etc. (Bonus: Men and women are different, and there are only two sexes.) The tone was not "these are breakthroughs to look forward to"; rather, "things are coming that people we disagree with are going to exploit, but they are nonetheless real". Another interpretation would be "please don't yell at us for discovering these things".

NedF 8mo ago

[dead]