First, the context of guessing someone’s likely adult traits (disease risk, personality, …) based on their family history and childhood environment. That leads to twin and adoption studies. How do they work, what are the assumptions, what does “E” *really* mean, etc.? (2/7) - ThreadSky

stevebyrnes.bsky.social • 45 days ago

First, the context of guessing someone’s likely adult traits (disease risk, personality, …) based on their family history and childhood environment. That leads to twin and adoption studies. How do they work, what are the assumptions, what does “E” *really* mean, etc.? (2/7)

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stevebyrnes.bsky.social•45 days ago

Second, the context of parenting decisions. I bring up what I call “the bio-determinist child-rearing rule-of-thumb”, why we should believe it, and its broader lessons for how to think about childhood … AND the many important cases where it DOESN’T apply!! (3/7)

stevebyrnes.bsky.social•45 days ago

Third, the context of assessing whether YOU should try hard to be your best self, or whether “I shouldn’t bother because my fate is determined by my genes”. (Spoiler: it’s the former!) (4/7)

stevebyrnes.bsky.social•45 days ago

Fourth, the context of PGS & the Missing Heritability Problem. I’m a big advocate for “epistasis”, i.e. a nonlinear map from genome to (some but not all) outcomes. I argue that epistasis in human outcomes is widely misunderstood even by experts. (5/7)

stevebyrnes.bsky.social•45 days ago

Fifth, the context of trying to understand some outcome (schizophrenia, extroversion, or whatever) by studying the genes that correlate with it. I argue that this activity is useful on the margin and can be done well, despite the humiliating “candidate gene” fiasco of a couple decades ago. (6/7)

stevebyrnes.bsky.social•45 days ago

Again, here’s the link to the post! I’m learning as I go, happy for feedback & discussion! Thanks @ent3c.bsky.social for your book, which was exceptionally clear and helpful, even if I wound up disagreeing with parts of it. (7/7) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xXtDCeYLBR88QWebJ/heritability-five-battles

ent3c.bsky.social•45 days ago

How do you do the cool formatting when you hover in the margins?

stevebyrnes.bsky.social•45 days ago

OK, so https://lesswrong.com is a mix of (1) a blogging platform (same genre as wordpress) and (2) a community forum (same genre as a subreddit) with, umm, idiosyncratic focus.

For the blogging platform part, they built their own blog-writing software. The margin thing is just one of the built-in features.

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