In the paper you address ethnic portability by comparing the validity for European Americans to the validity for Americans of non-European decent. But how much of a decrease in validity did you see between the British validation set and European Americans? This seems like an important bit of information that's being left out.
Other IQ PGS have seen a drop of 75% or more in that setting.
The ABCD cohort represents a european validation sample. Therefore, the numbers shown in figure 1A (ABCD Study) answer this question. Nevertheless, we will soon have an updated version of the preprint out where we perform (based on some feedback we got after the release of the first version) formal latent variable modeling, which shows that the performance difference between ABCD and UKB on latent g is in fact miniscule when the factor structure is properly taken into account. Besides that I am not aware of any study showing a drop of 75% from UK to US whites. Can you elaborate on what you are referring to?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34995502/ this study showed a drop in r^2 from 2.6% for British samples to 0.6% for Polish samples for g. Was mistaken about it being for Americans but nonetheless a huge drop when comparing different European populations.
That's a surprising outlier, which I hadn't yet noticed, though I have read the paper quite a few times, thanks! I would not overinterpret it because this is in all likelihood mainly an issue with the UKB fluid intelligence test and english not being the first language of the polish people taking it. The paper you linked in general finds a clear linear relationship between effect size reduction of the score and genetic distance, which we both replicate in the intelligence validation paper as well as in our earlier disease whitepaper (there also explicitly for the poles in UKB, where we see basically no reduction). If this relationship holds for people of much more distal ancestries for intelligence in ABCD and for a wide array of diseases and biomarkers in UKB, I think measurement issues due to language skills is indeed the most likely explanation for this outlier.
High IQs are associated with Asperger’s, plenty of mental illnesses. Was always afraid of using this technology because I might be influenced to select a more autistic embryo. Especially as a woman who’s a little “off” in a non-clinical way, who would presumably only be able to mate with a nerdy guy
Thank you for your article, It is very interesting. I was wondering whether you see one of the political left or the political right as more of a threat to parents' access to reproductive technology, and also would like to ask whether Herasight has a functional product yet.
The product is ready to go, and we’ve already served about 80 customers.
Pushback tends to come from some religious conservatives who think IVF is wrong because embryos are people, and from some on the woke left, who don’t like genetic explanations of mental traits. But we’ve been pleasantly surprised by support on all sides, especially privately.
In the paper you address ethnic portability by comparing the validity for European Americans to the validity for Americans of non-European decent. But how much of a decrease in validity did you see between the British validation set and European Americans? This seems like an important bit of information that's being left out.
Other IQ PGS have seen a drop of 75% or more in that setting.
The ABCD cohort represents a european validation sample. Therefore, the numbers shown in figure 1A (ABCD Study) answer this question. Nevertheless, we will soon have an updated version of the preprint out where we perform (based on some feedback we got after the release of the first version) formal latent variable modeling, which shows that the performance difference between ABCD and UKB on latent g is in fact miniscule when the factor structure is properly taken into account. Besides that I am not aware of any study showing a drop of 75% from UK to US whites. Can you elaborate on what you are referring to?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34995502/ this study showed a drop in r^2 from 2.6% for British samples to 0.6% for Polish samples for g. Was mistaken about it being for Americans but nonetheless a huge drop when comparing different European populations.
That's a surprising outlier, which I hadn't yet noticed, though I have read the paper quite a few times, thanks! I would not overinterpret it because this is in all likelihood mainly an issue with the UKB fluid intelligence test and english not being the first language of the polish people taking it. The paper you linked in general finds a clear linear relationship between effect size reduction of the score and genetic distance, which we both replicate in the intelligence validation paper as well as in our earlier disease whitepaper (there also explicitly for the poles in UKB, where we see basically no reduction). If this relationship holds for people of much more distal ancestries for intelligence in ABCD and for a wide array of diseases and biomarkers in UKB, I think measurement issues due to language skills is indeed the most likely explanation for this outlier.
High IQs are associated with Asperger’s, plenty of mental illnesses. Was always afraid of using this technology because I might be influenced to select a more autistic embryo. Especially as a woman who’s a little “off” in a non-clinical way, who would presumably only be able to mate with a nerdy guy
We check for exactly these things in figure 5 of the paper and do not find any evidence for this. This is in fact in line with the recent literature, see for example Williams et al. (2023): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-psychiatry/article/high-intelligence-is-not-associated-with-a-greater-propensity-for-mental-health-disorders/E101AE4EDBC8FBAEE5170F6C0679021C
Thank you for your article, It is very interesting. I was wondering whether you see one of the political left or the political right as more of a threat to parents' access to reproductive technology, and also would like to ask whether Herasight has a functional product yet.
The product is ready to go, and we’ve already served about 80 customers.
Pushback tends to come from some religious conservatives who think IVF is wrong because embryos are people, and from some on the woke left, who don’t like genetic explanations of mental traits. But we’ve been pleasantly surprised by support on all sides, especially privately.