GNXP

See, this is exactly the problem I'm talking about. For example, you are referencing Feldman&Riskin, as if they have made some cogent argument. They have not, their review is a mess. Consider Nick Patterson's response:

> Let us discuss the genetics of Educational Attainment (EA) defined as the number of years of schooling and measured in adults over 30 years old. EA takes up a good part both of the book and the review. Using genetic data from more than 300,000 individuals of European ancestry, it was possible to develop a ‘score’ using the genomes of the people in the study (Okbay et al. Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment, Nature, 2016). The details of the score are of lesser importance, but it’s important to realize that the score is a single number calculated from a genomic sample, by a fixed recipe. The score is correlated with EA at an enormously significant statistical level. This result was then replicated in an Icelandic study, using entirely different individuals from the first study. (Kong et al. Selection against variants in the genome associated with educational attainment, PNAS, 2017). Again enormously significant results were obtained.

> How do Feldman and Riskin explain these results? After a somewhat rambling diatribe complaining that choices were made in the details of the score, and how exactly the EA phenotype was chosen to study, they conclude that ‘researchers are [not] counting anything but their own…

Part of me wonders if things could improve if the resources put towards "drug discovery" could go further if they were allocated to tooling to allow for individuals to synthesize drugs tailored to their present state.

With increasingly more data available on the drugs released by FDA, EMA, etc, combined with cheap genetic sequencing and other measurements, part of me wonders if the statistical approaches with some sub fields of chemistry combined with bioinformatics could move things from the era where certain drugs are produced in mass to one where getting certain interactions with compounds to take place based on and individuals state.

Razib Kahn talks[0] about this recently:

"There’s a debate that periodically crops up online about the utility, viability, and morality of returning results from genetic tests to consumers. Consumers here means people like you or me. Pretty much everyone.

If you want to caricature two stylized camps, there are information maximalists who proclaim a utopia now, where people can find out so much about themselves through their genome. And then there are information elitists, who emphasize that the public can’t handle the truth. Or, more accurately, that throwing information without context and interpretation from someone who knows better is not just useless, it’s dangerous.

Of course, most people will stake out more nuanced complex positions. That’s not the point. Here is my bottom-line, which I’ve probably held since about ~2010:

-…

As far as I can tell, the entire "Out of Africa" model taken for granted within the MSM is being treated with increasing skepticism/nuance by scientists actually studying the facts on the ground, leading to these odd & increasingly ancient "first modern out of Africa" stories which may be confusing the public more than they're illuminating the history of human populations.

Razib Khan had a good short primer on this topic a little while back [1], excerpt:

The data for non-Africans is rather unequivocal. The vast majority of (>90%) of the ancestry of non-Africans seems to go back to a small number of common ancestors ~60,000 years ago. Perhaps in the range of ~1,000 individuals. These individuals seem to be a node within a phylogenetic tree where all the other branches are occupied by African populations. Between this period and ~15,000 years ago these non-Africans underwent a massive range expansion, until modern humans were present on all continents except Antarctica. Additionally, after the Holocene some of these non-African groups also experienced huge population growth due to intensive agricultural practice.

To give a sense of what I’m getting at, the bottleneck and common ancestry of non-Africans goes back ~60,000 years, but the shared ancestry of Khoisan peoples and non-Khoisan peoples goes back ~150,000-200,000 years. A major lacunae of the current discussion is that often the dynamics which characterize non-Africans are assumed to be applicable to Africans. But…

Anti-poverty policy (especially foreign aid) over the past five decades has consisted mainly of giving away food, healthcare, etc. For a while, this decreased death rates substantially in the third world. But the problem was that when the death rates decreased, we simply got more and more poor people.

Ethiopia received great quantities of foreign aid in the 1980's. Now thirty years later its population has doubled and it is on the brink of famine yet again:

Yet the wide-eyed children of 1984-86, who were saved by western medicines and foodstuffs, helped begin the greatest population explosion in human history, which will bring Ethiopia's population to 170 million by 2050. By that time, Nigeria's population will be 340 million, (up from just 19 million in 1930). The same is true over much of Africa.

Thus we are heading towards a demographic holocaust, with a potential premature loss of life far exceeding that of all the wars of the 20th Century. This terrible truth cannot be ignored. ( Kevin Myers, http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/kevin-myers/writing-what-i-should-have-written-so-many-years-ago-1437779.html )

Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9, makes the same point about Johanessberg in South Africa: Well, in my opinion, you have out-of-control population growth … —we are heading for the biggest train wreck our civilization has ever come across ever. If your population curve is on an exponential growth, and the resources are on an exponential…

> You can't measure a person's intelligence using a test.

Do you actually believe this dogma?

This Usenet post should be read by all "IQ deniers":
http://tiny.cc/F7gxA

"according to IQ doubters, knowing how smart I am should
tell you nothing about my IQ. It is as likely to be 50 as 150."

The same poster once proposed a beautiful test of the depth of an IQ denier's beliefs:

You are to be operated on, and have been given a choice between two surgeons. You know nothing about them, save for the IQ of each. Will you choose the surgeon with the lower IQ? What if the difference between them is an entire standard deviation? Two standard deviations? If you truly believe that IQ tests measure nothing - that the result of any such test is essentially a random number - you should happily choose the surgeon with the lower score. If you do not believe it, we are merely quibbling over the accuracy of existing tests.

Moreover, the only way to seriously dismiss the existing IQ tests as hopelessly inaccurate is to borrow tricks from the Creationists' playbook wholesale (as Steven Jay Gould, the patron saint of IQ denial, often did) and close your eyes (and more importantly, those of your audience) to reams of high-quality data.

More references, for those actually interested:
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/1198gottfred.html

And if you want to know the core driving force behind the IQ…

I mostly follow Razib Khan's reporting on this work. It is really dense and uses domain lingo, so it can be rather hard to parse. But, here are some narratives that are changing:

1. Genetic findings among South-East Asians indicate that the maritime powers of India (and mostly south India) were of greater significance at their peak than the Delhi sultanate or the Delhi centric view held by most historians. [1][2]

2. We are expecting huge changes to our understanding of ancient humans in Africa [3]

3. The most famous co-evolution fact of milk-and-lactose-tolerance might not be true [4][5]

4. The so-called-indo-aryans might not have brought the caste system or "Indian culture" with them. The Dravidians are almost just as "indo-aryan" as their non-Dravidian counter parts and the Aryan-Invasion-Theory, might not have had an invasion to speak of at all. [6][7]

These are extreme simplifications of the interesting stuff I found that was relevant to my country. I'm sure there is just as much about every other culture and it's just as spicy. Also, emphasis on 'might' & 'probably'. These fields are mid-disruption, and facts on the ground are changing as we speak.

[1] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/10/06/likely-male-mediated-indianization-in-southeast-asia/

[2] https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/09/20/indic-civilization-came-to-southeast-asia-because-indian-people-came-to-southeast-asia-lots-of-them/

[3]…