It's roughly the increase in average years of schooling that's observed every 15-20 years in the US or UK (https://barrolee.github.io/BarroLeeDataSet/DataLeeLee.html), so equivalent to the environmental intervention of ~waves hands~ whatever we've been doing.
That’s a false comparison. Whatever gives you an extra 10 months of education now, is not the same as “wait 20 years, and then everybody gets more education”.
Years of education proxies something valuable. It is not the valuable thing itself. If it were, we should just mandate that everybody goes to university. Problem solved! We’ve made everybody smarter! Alas, it’s not that simple.
If, counterfactually, it were that simple, then a head start equivalent to being born 20 years later would still be a massive advantage that people would give their eye teeth for.
I don't think so, the point of the comparison is that kids born today have the equivalent of optimal embryo selection gains compared to kids born 15-20 years ago because of ~waves hands~ all the things we've been doing as a society to improve access to education. And, to be clear, embryo selection is not going to give you 10 months of education now either. The scores have not reached the within-family heritability (and would require GWAS of at least several million families to do so) and the embryo selection process is not yet efficient enough to reliably get 10 healthy embryos. It *is* possible to give your kids a tutor for 1 month a year though, and probably cheaper than IVF + sequencing and you don't have to worry about the genetic correlation with SCZ/BD.
>>Years of education proxies something valuable. It is not the valuable thing itself.
This is like saying `hours spent exercising per week` is just proxying fitness but isn't the valuable thing itself. The relationship between education and it's outcomes has likewise been shown to be bi-directional using a variety of different causal inference approaches, both genetic and non-genetic.
None of the causal studies of education measure the causal effect of waiting 20 years! In fact, there is evidence that the marginal benefits of education have been declining as it has become more widespread. Sure, hiring a tutor might be a good thing… Do we have evidence that it gets you an extra year of education?
The Mendelian Randomization studies are conducted in older adults and are essentially structured this way: take genetic variation that influences educational attainment in early adulthood then look at it's effect on downstream outcomes in late adulthood. Many of the studies in Ritchie et al. 2018 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618774253) had several decades of follow-up and of course Ritchie et al. 2015 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25775112/) looked at outcomes at age 70.
He asked about studies whether education causally improves outcomes, not biological variable named 'educational attainment', so you would need education RCT and not Mendelian Randomization. If they know education improves intelligence, why not just everyone start making 160 IQ geniuses? Just copy education that Isaac Newton or some other genius had. It's not like copying Newton's education is considered of taboo like cloning people is.
The Educational Endowment Foundation has a handy tool kit that allows you to search for evidence-based interventions based on impact (months of schooling). See here:
I appreciate it’s not focused on IQ, but gives you a good sense of the magnitude of environmental impact on highly heritable social and behavioural traits …
I take the opposite position from most of your critics, which is that even these paltry effects are an exaggeration. The problem with refined statistical analysis that is used to explain basic failures, is little different than when astrologers look at more specific planetary effects or add extra planetary effects to get a positive result. I can show you plenty of astrology studies that have positive effects rivaling GWAS. The problem here is that you are starting from the assumption that there is some genetic effect as soon as you call it a “trait.” If you pursue these studies with the assumption that the trait does not have a genetic basis, you will likely reach that conclusion, perhaps sans a few genes for skin color and the like. So the problem is statistical analysis, itself, applied to a bias from the outset. Moreover, Kendler, who spent his career looking for nonexistent schizophrenia genes, argues for a continuum only because it fits his circular assumption of genetic causality. While there are certainly gray areas for diagnosing schizophrenia, it is reasonably an either or, and if it was on a (presumed bell curve) continuum, you would see many more people with “almost” schizophrenia than those with schizophrenia, not to mention half the curve with “antischizophrenia.”
What have people denying genetic effects on schizophrenia have even accomplished? Would you go and say that parents of children with autism and schizophrenia are guilty of child neglect?
Your substack is outstanding.
“With 10 embryos, one can get a gain equivalent to ~10 months of schooling if selecting on educational attainment”.
Isn’t this huge? In fact, is there any environmental intervention that delivers such a big impact?
It's roughly the increase in average years of schooling that's observed every 15-20 years in the US or UK (https://barrolee.github.io/BarroLeeDataSet/DataLeeLee.html), so equivalent to the environmental intervention of ~waves hands~ whatever we've been doing.
That’s a false comparison. Whatever gives you an extra 10 months of education now, is not the same as “wait 20 years, and then everybody gets more education”.
Years of education proxies something valuable. It is not the valuable thing itself. If it were, we should just mandate that everybody goes to university. Problem solved! We’ve made everybody smarter! Alas, it’s not that simple.
If, counterfactually, it were that simple, then a head start equivalent to being born 20 years later would still be a massive advantage that people would give their eye teeth for.
>>That’s a false comparison
I don't think so, the point of the comparison is that kids born today have the equivalent of optimal embryo selection gains compared to kids born 15-20 years ago because of ~waves hands~ all the things we've been doing as a society to improve access to education. And, to be clear, embryo selection is not going to give you 10 months of education now either. The scores have not reached the within-family heritability (and would require GWAS of at least several million families to do so) and the embryo selection process is not yet efficient enough to reliably get 10 healthy embryos. It *is* possible to give your kids a tutor for 1 month a year though, and probably cheaper than IVF + sequencing and you don't have to worry about the genetic correlation with SCZ/BD.
>>Years of education proxies something valuable. It is not the valuable thing itself.
This is like saying `hours spent exercising per week` is just proxying fitness but isn't the valuable thing itself. The relationship between education and it's outcomes has likewise been shown to be bi-directional using a variety of different causal inference approaches, both genetic and non-genetic.
None of the causal studies of education measure the causal effect of waiting 20 years! In fact, there is evidence that the marginal benefits of education have been declining as it has become more widespread. Sure, hiring a tutor might be a good thing… Do we have evidence that it gets you an extra year of education?
The Mendelian Randomization studies are conducted in older adults and are essentially structured this way: take genetic variation that influences educational attainment in early adulthood then look at it's effect on downstream outcomes in late adulthood. Many of the studies in Ritchie et al. 2018 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797618774253) had several decades of follow-up and of course Ritchie et al. 2015 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25775112/) looked at outcomes at age 70.
He asked about studies whether education causally improves outcomes, not biological variable named 'educational attainment', so you would need education RCT and not Mendelian Randomization. If they know education improves intelligence, why not just everyone start making 160 IQ geniuses? Just copy education that Isaac Newton or some other genius had. It's not like copying Newton's education is considered of taboo like cloning people is.
The Educational Endowment Foundation has a handy tool kit that allows you to search for evidence-based interventions based on impact (months of schooling). See here:
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit
I appreciate it’s not focused on IQ, but gives you a good sense of the magnitude of environmental impact on highly heritable social and behavioural traits …
I take the opposite position from most of your critics, which is that even these paltry effects are an exaggeration. The problem with refined statistical analysis that is used to explain basic failures, is little different than when astrologers look at more specific planetary effects or add extra planetary effects to get a positive result. I can show you plenty of astrology studies that have positive effects rivaling GWAS. The problem here is that you are starting from the assumption that there is some genetic effect as soon as you call it a “trait.” If you pursue these studies with the assumption that the trait does not have a genetic basis, you will likely reach that conclusion, perhaps sans a few genes for skin color and the like. So the problem is statistical analysis, itself, applied to a bias from the outset. Moreover, Kendler, who spent his career looking for nonexistent schizophrenia genes, argues for a continuum only because it fits his circular assumption of genetic causality. While there are certainly gray areas for diagnosing schizophrenia, it is reasonably an either or, and if it was on a (presumed bell curve) continuum, you would see many more people with “almost” schizophrenia than those with schizophrenia, not to mention half the curve with “antischizophrenia.”
What have people denying genetic effects on schizophrenia have even accomplished? Would you go and say that parents of children with autism and schizophrenia are guilty of child neglect?