Comment by tptacek

5 hours ago

The "warring camps" framing is very overstated. Greenberg, who doesn't practice in this space, believes it to be a vital concern, but giants in the twin-study practitioner field freely cite GWAS results, including the EA studies.

A 2015 twin study result is basically a citation to the phlogiston era of polygenic population-wide genetic surveys. Heritability estimates of that vintage basically define away indirect genetic effects, which subsequent work appears to have very clearly established; the work now is on characterizing and bounding it, not asking whether it's real.

"Blog post looks biased" is not a good way to address this unless you actually practice in the space, like the author does, and are in conversation with other practitioners in the space, like the author is. You find lots of --- let's generally call them pop science writers --- knee-jerk responding to the new rounds of heritability numbers, but those same authors often wrote excitedly about how GWAS results would bolster their priors in the years before the results were published. It's worth paying attention to the backgrounds of the people writing about this stuff!

I substantially rewrote this comment, which was sprawling; the original is preserved here: https://gist.github.com/tqbf/b118ec9f9e69e0f3f61003c152d0d44...