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I can’t put much stock in something that’s not peer-reviewed, nor something that’s not confirmed as reproducible. Herasight, the company, has a deep conflict of interest when publishing a paper like this, don’t you think? It’s like the tobacco industry publishing about the effects of smoking.

Two other issues: do the cognitive tests control for socioeconomic status? Otherwise you’re just measuring the effect of nurture, not nature.

Second, the UKB fluid intelligence test isn’t a rigorous or reliable measure to fully capture latent GCA.



We already know from twin studies that g is 80% heritable, so the effect of nurture on intelligence is slim to none.


Again a couple of thoughts occur: 1) you’re greatly discounting the effects of epigenetics on development and trait expressiveness, so even if you tailor for everything as you wish, you’re still only going to guarantee outcomes in a certain range, and 2) heritability is population-level, not individual level. So a figure like “80%” means that that much variation in intelligence in a given *population* is associated with genetic variation. This does NOT mean that 80% of a person’s intelligence comes from their genes. 3) you’re also completely neglecting the effects of genetic nuture, besides environmental effects.




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