Steve Hsu: prediction

Transcript context

…So let's talk about one of the traits that people might be interested in potentially selecting for: intelligence. What is the potential for us to acquire the data to correlate the genotype with intelligence? Well, that's the most personally frustrating aspect of all of this stuff. If you asked me ten years ago when I started doing this stuff what were we going to get, everything was gone. On the optimistic side of what I would have predicted, so everything's good. Didn't turn out to be interactively nonlinear, or it didn't turn out to be interactively pleiotropic. All these good things, —which nobody could have known a priori how they would work—turned out to be good for gene engineers of the 21st century. The one frustrating thing is because of crazy wokeism, and fear of crazy wokists, the most interesting phenotype of all is lagging because everybody's afraid, even though there are very good reasons for medical researchers to want to know the cognitive ability of people in their studies. For example, when you want to study aging, or decline of cognitive function memory, in older people, you want to have baseline measurements of how good their cognitive function was when they were younger, right? So very good reasons for why you want to have all this data. But, researchers are afraid because it's also linked to all these controversial social issues. So, there's just a ginormous amount of genomic data, where there's no cognitive measurement attached as a field to that data—which would have been very cheap to measure. Again, wokists hate this, but I can measure your IQ on a 12-minute test no problem, right? Not with perfect accuracy, but I can get instrumental measurements. If I take it the NFL has this thing called the Wonderlic—every player being considered for the draft is asked to take this Wonderlic—it's a short test, 12 minutes long, and it's pretty highly correlated (0.8 or 0.9), maybe with a more fulsome IQ measure. So, it would be trivial and inexpensive to gather this data. Once we have my prediction from this earlier math that I was talking about, when you get to a border a million, it could be 1 million or 2 million well-phenotyped people and genomes, we would be able to build a pretty decent IQ predictor that might have a standard error of maybe 10 points or something. That would be incredible for science, but not getting done. Suppose there are differences in how things are tagged between different ancestral groups (I'm not talking about average differences or anything, just how the genotype is tagged). And if the Chinese do this first, then, they have an advantage that can't be transferred over, right? Because it's only applicable or advantageously applicable to their population.…

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