Stuart Ritchie, a psychologist and science writer, covers research quality, genetics policy, academic culture, and the politics of science.
HN commenters link his posts to rebut or add context in debates over the NIH genetics data policy and a criticized sociology study.
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…
Hi all,
I'm one of the authors of the reply and it was very interesting reading so many diverse thoughts and comments. I would love to respond to all of them, but it would take ages. Luckily, Stuart Ritchie (@StuartJRitchie) wrote an awesome post on his substack (https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/nudge-meta) that goes much deeper and adresses many questions and the fair critique raised here.
Also, note that there is only a limited amount of information and nuance you can comprise into a strict 500 words reply limit in PNAS, which is the reason we focus only on one aspect of the original meta-analysis -- publication bias.
Cheers,
Frantisek
There's currently no patent on Lexapro, Prozac, or Risperdal either. "These companies" now have basically zero incentive to support them or to sic "PR goons" on their opponents.
There are also legitimate concerns about biases in the evidence base for claims about the efficacy of psychedelics: https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/psychedelics
And yes, psychedelics have side effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder
If you do a simple ctrl+f on the article for "MDMA", the second result directly addresses MDMA used for PTSD[0], and the big issues surrounding clinical trials for it. Based on the treatment of participants in MAPS trials, conducted under Health Canada, I would treat anything the FDA says about psychedelics with a large amount of skepticism too.
[0] https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/psychedelics?s=r#:~:text=the%20harm,-Anyone%20who%E2%80%99s
The white admixture could allow you to do admixture studies. Ie examine the inherited white regions see how white polygenic educational attainment scores vs pigmentation scores affect outcomes
This is explicitly forbidden in terms of use of the best databases however
https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/nih-genetics
Calling this[1] "an article about racist dog names" is a complete misrepresentation. It's a critique of a study published in Social Psychology Quarterly, which is an official journal of the American Sociological Association.
[1] - https://stuartritchie.substack.com/p/dog-name-racism