Information Processing
Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will Favorite posts | Manifold podcast | Twitter: @hsu_steve
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
Seminar on Black Hole Information and Quantum Hair, Yangzhou University (video)
Wednesday, May 11, 2022
Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information -- Quantum Gravity and All of That seminar series (video)
Title: Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information
Abstract: I discuss recent results concerning the quantum state of the gravitational field of a compact matter source such as a black hole. These results demonstrate the existence of quantum hair, violating the classical No Hair Theorems. I then discuss how this quantum hair affects Hawking radiation, allowing unitary evaporation of black holes. Small corrections to leading order Hawking radiation amplitudes, with weak dependence on the external graviton state, are sufficient to produce a pure final radiation state. The radiation state violates the factorization assumption made in standard formulations of the information paradox. These conclusions are consequences of long wavelength properties of quantum gravity: no special assumptions are made concerning short distance (Planckian) physics.
Thursday, May 05, 2022
Raghuveer Parthasarathy: Four Physical Principles and Biophysics -- Manifold podcast #11
key holez • 2 days ago
It was a fascinating episode, and I immediately went out and ordered the book! One question that came to mind: given how much of the human genome is dedicated to complex regulatory mechanisms and not proteins as such, it seems unintuitive to me that so much of heritability seems to be additive. I would have thought that in a system with lots of complicated,messy on/off switches, small genetic differences would often lead to large phenotype differences -- but if what I've heard about polygenic prediction is right, then, empirically, assuming everything is linear seems to work just fine (outside of rare variants, maybe). Is there a clear explanation for how complex feedback patterns give rise to linearity in the end? Is it just another manifestation of the central limit theorem...?
steve hsu
This is an active area of research. It is somewhat surprising even to me how well linearity / additivity holds in human genetics. Searches for non-linear effects on complex traits have been largely unsuccessful -- i.e., in the sense that most of the variance seems to be controlled by additive effects. By now this has been investigated for large numbers of traits including major diseases, quantitive traits such as blood biomarkers, height, cognitive ability, etc.
One possible explanation is that because humans are so similar to each other, and have passed through tight evolutionary bottlenecks, *individual differences* between humans are mainly due to small additive effects, located both in regulatory and coding regions.
To genetically edit a human into a frog presumably requires many changes in loci with big nonlinear effects. However, it may be the case that almost all such genetic variants are *fixed* in the human population: what makes two individuals different from each other is mainly small additive effects.
Zooming out slightly, the implications for human genetic engineering are very positive. Vast pools of additive variance means that multiplex gene editing will not be impossibly hard...This topic is discussed further in the review article: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.05870
Tuesday, May 03, 2022
How We Learned, Then Forgot, About Human Intelligence... And Witnessing the Live Breakdown of Academia (podcast interview with Cactus Chu)
Timestamps:
3:24 Interview Starts
15:49 Cactus' Experience with High Math People
19:49 High School Sports
21:26 Comparison to Intelligence
26:29 Is Lack of Understanding due to Denial or Ignorance?
29:29 The Past and Present of Selection in Academia
37:02 How Universities Look from the Inside
44:19 Informal Networks Replacing Credentials
48:37 Capture of Research Positions
50:24 Progressivism as Demagoguery Against the Self-Made
55:31 Innumeracy is Common
1:06:53 Understanding Innumerate People
1:13:53 Skill Alignment at Cactus' High School
1:18:12 Free Speech in Academia
1:21:00 You Shouldn't Fire Exceptional People
1:23:03 The Anti-Excellence Progressives
1:28:42 Rawls, Nozick, and Technology
1:34:00 Freedom = Variance = Inequality
1:37:58 Dating Apps
1:41:27 Jumping Into Social Problems From a Technical Background
1:41:50 Steve's High School Pranks
1:46:43 996 and Cactus' High School
1:50:26 The Vietnam War and Social Change
1:53:07 Are Podcasts the Future?
1:59:37 The Power of New Things
2:02:56 The Birth of Twitter
2:07:27 Selection Creates Quality
2:10:21 Incentives of University Departments
2:16:29 Woke Bureaucrats
2:27:59 Building a New University
2:30:42 What needs more order?
2:31:56 What needs more chaos?
@hsu_steve on innumerate journalists, professors, and politicians:
— Cactus Chu (@cactus_chu) May 3, 2022
"If you are not high [Math], you cannot reason from statistical data" pic.twitter.com/N3glUITCXH
Sunday, May 01, 2022
Complex Trait Prediction: Methods and Protocols (Springer 2022)
Complex Trait Prediction: Methods and Protocols (Springer Nature)
Editors:
Nourollah Ahmadi and Jérôme Bartholomé
CIRAD, UMR AGAP Institut, Montpellier, France
About this book
This volume explores the conceptual framework and the practical issues related to genomic prediction of complex traits in human medicine and in animal and plant breeding. The book is organized into five parts. Part One reminds molecular genetics approaches intending to predict phenotypic variations. Part Two presents the principles of genomic prediction of complex traits, and reviews factors that affect its reliability. Part Three describes genomic prediction methods, including machine-learning approaches, accounting for different degree of biological complexity, and reviews the associated computer-packages. Part Four reports on emerging trends such as phenomic prediction and incorporation into genomic prediction models of “omics” data and crop growth models. Part Five is dedicated to lessons learned from case studies in the fields of human health and animal and plant breeding, and to methods for analysis of the economic effectiveness of genomic prediction.
Written in the highly successful Methods in Molecular Biology series format, the book provides theoretical bases and practical guidelines for an informed decision making of practitioners and identifies pertinent routes for further methodological researches. Cutting-edge and thorough, Complex Trait Predictions: Methods and Protocols is a valuable resource for scientists and researchers who are interested in learning more about this important and developing field.Our article (pp 421–446):
From Genotype to Phenotype: Polygenic Prediction of Complex Human Traits
T. Raben, L. Lello, E.Widen, and S. Hsu
Decoding the genome confers the capability to predict characteristics of the organism (phenotype) from DNA (genotype). We describe the present status and future prospects of genomic prediction of complex traits in humans. Some highly heritable complex phenotypes such as height and other quantitative traits can already be predicted with reasonable accuracy from DNA alone. For many diseases, including important common conditions such as coronary artery disease, breast cancer, type I and II diabetes, individuals with outlier polygenic scores (e.g., top few percent) have been shown to have 5 or even 10 times higher risk than average. Several psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and autism also fall into this category. We discuss related topics such as the genetic architecture of complex traits, sibling validation of polygenic scores, and applications to adult health, in vitro fertilization (embryo selection), and genetic engineering.
Monday, April 25, 2022
Has Hawking's Black Hole Information Paradox Been Resolved? (Video of MSU Theory Seminar 4/22/2022)
Thursday, April 21, 2022
Carl Zha: Xinjiang, Ukraine, and U.S.-China relations — Manifold podcast #10
Thursday, April 14, 2022
Black Hole Information and Quantum Hair in 10 minutes! (video)
Thursday, April 07, 2022
Scott Aaronson: Quantum Computing, Unsolvable Problems, & Artificial Intelligence — Manifold podcast #9
Thursday, March 24, 2022
Sebastian Mallaby: Venture capital as an engine of courage — Manifold Podcast #8
Friday, March 18, 2022
Quantum Hair from Gravity (published version in Physical Review Letters)
Quantum Hair from Gravity
Xavier Calmet, Roberto Casadio, Stephen D. H. Hsu, and Folkert Kuipers
Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 111301 – Published 17 March 2022
We explore the relationship between the quantum state of a compact matter source and of its asymptotic graviton field. For a matter source in an energy eigenstate, the graviton state is determined at leading order by the energy eigenvalue. Insofar as there are no accidental energy degeneracies there is a one to one map between graviton states on the boundary of spacetime and the matter source states. Effective field theory allows us to compute a purely quantum gravitational effect which causes the subleading asymptotic behavior of the graviton state to depend on the internal structure of the source. This establishes the existence of ubiquitous quantum hair due to gravitational effects.The paper establishes that the quantum state of the graviton field (equivalently, the spacetime metric) of a compact matter source depends on the quantum state of the source. This can be established without a short distance theory of quantum gravity -- i.e., near the Planck length. Our results are long wavelength effects and are insensitive to the details of short distance physics, such as whether gravitons are excitations of strings, or something else, at the most fundamental level.
Quantum hair and black hole information
Physics Letters B Volume 827, 10 April 2022, 136995
Xavier Calmet and Stephen D.H. Hsu
It has been shown that the quantum state of the graviton field outside a black hole horizon carries information about the internal state of the hole. We explain how this allows unitary evaporation: the final radiation state is a complex superposition which depends linearly on the initial black hole state. Under time reversal, the radiation state evolves back to the original black hole quantum state. Formulations of the information paradox on a fixed semiclassical geometry describe only a small subset of the evaporation Hilbert space, and do not exclude overall unitarity.
Note to experts: the companion paper explains why Mathur's Theorem (i.e., entanglement entropy must always increase by ~ln 2 with each emitted qubit) is evaded once one considers BH evolution in the full radiation Hilbert space. The radiation Hilbert space is much larger than the small subspace which remains after conditioning on any specific spacetime background or BH recoil trajectory. Even exponentially small entanglement between different radiation states (mediated by quantum hair) can unitarize the evaporation process.
This is also explained in detail in the talk video and slides linked below.
Press coverage:
Earlier discussion, with more background on the Hawking paradox. See especially the important work by Suvrat Raju and collaborators:
Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information (December 2021)
Monday, March 14, 2022
"The Pressure to Conform is Enormous": Steve Hsu on Affirmative Action, Assimilation and IQ Outliers (CSPI Podcast with Richard Hanania)
Full transcript at Richard's substack.Begin: American society, growing up as child of immigrants18m: Russia-Ukraine conflict (eve of invasion), geopolitical implications (China, India, Germany, EU)38m: Affirmative Action, Harvard case at SCOTUS54m: Woke leftists at the university, destruction of meritocracy, STEM vs Social Justice advocacy, Sokal Hoax1h25m: Academic economics, 2008 credit crisis, Do economists test theories?1h33m: Maverick thinking, Agreeableness, Aspergers, Pressure to conform1h39m: Far-tail intelligence, Jeff Bezos and physics, progress in science and technology
Friday, March 11, 2022
Genomic Prediction’s Stephen Hsu: Making superhumans will be possible (Sunday Times podcast)
Genomic Prediction’s Stephen Hsu: Making superhumans will be possible
The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Stephen Hsu, co-founder of Genomic Prediction, to talk about the plummeting price of genomic sequencing (5:00), predicting height and cancer (9:10), mining biobanks (14:25), scoring embryos (19:00), why investors are staying anonymous (28:00), the need for a society-wide discussion (32:30), when he was accused of being a eugenicist (37:25), how powerful genetic prediction can be (43:15), genetic engineering (49:45), and why Denmark is the future (59:30).
Thursday, March 10, 2022
Vlatko Vedral: Oxford Theoretical Physicist on Quantum Superposition of Living Creatures — Manifold Podcast #7
Wednesday, March 09, 2022
Geopolitics and Empire podcast: The End of the Unipolar Moment & the Cementing in Blood of the Eurasian Alliance
Physicist, startup founder, and polymath Steve Hsu discusses the end of the unipolar moment, the return of geopolitics, and the U.S.-China New Cold War. He believes China is not as fragile as some say. We talk Taiwan, how Beijing has caught up in military tech, and how the nature of naval warfare in the next war will be very different. On the technology and AI front, he feels the U.S. and China are at parity, but that the long-term trend is in China's favor. He feels the social credit system is advancing just as fast in the West as in China and that the digital yuan is rapidly gaining in stature. He gives his view on the Ukraine crisis and how it has been a huge strategic error by the U.S. because it has cemented the Eurasian alliance. He's concerned about a systemic financial meltdown, discusses being a victim of woke cancel culture, and knowing Richard Feynman.
Friday, March 04, 2022
On Ukraine: the return of Multipolarity and Hard Power
Two years ago, Burns wrote a memoir entitled, The Back Channel. It directly contradicts the argument being proffered by the administration he now serves. In his book, Burns says over and over that Russians of all ideological stripes—not just Putin—loathed and feared NATO expansion. He quotes a memo he wrote while serving as counselor for political affairs at the US embassy in Moscow in 1995. ‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” he wrote in a 2008 memo to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”
While the Biden administration claims that Putin bears all the blame for the current Ukraine crisis, Burns makes clear that the US helped lay its foundations. By taking advantage of Russian weakness, he argues, Washington fueled the nationalist resentment that Putin exploits today. Burns calls the Clinton administration’s decision to expand NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic “premature at best, and needlessly provocative at worst.” And he describes the appetite for revenge it fostered among many in Moscow during Boris Yeltsin’s final years as Russia’s president. “As Russians stewed in their grievance and sense of disadvantage,” Burns writes, “a gathering storm of ‘stab in the back’ theories slowly swirled, leaving a mark on Russia’s relations with the West that would linger for decades.”
As the Bush administration moved toward opening NATO’s doors to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about a Russian backlash grew even starker. He told Rice it was “hard to overstate the strategic consequences” of offering NATO membership to Ukraine and predicted that “it will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” Although Burns couldn’t have predicted the specific kind of meddling Putin would employ—either in 2014 when he seized Crimea and fomented a rebellion in Ukraine’s east or today—he warned that the US was helping set in motion the kind of crisis that America faces today. Promise Ukraine membership in NATO, he wrote, and “There could be no doubt that Putin would fight back hard.”
Were a reporter to read Burns’ quotes to White House press secretary Jen Psaki today, she’d likely accuse them of “parroting Russian talking points.” But Burns is hardly alone. From inside the US government, many officials warned that US policy toward Russia might bring disaster. William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary from 1994 to 1997, almost resigned because of his opposition to NATO expansion. He has since declared that because of its policies in the 1990s, “the United States deserves much of the blame” for the deterioration in relations with Moscow. Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 served as US ambassador to Ukraine, has called Bush’s 2008 decision to declare that Ukraine would eventually join NATO “a real mistake.” Fiona Hill, who gained fame during the Trump impeachment saga, says that as national intelligence officers for Russia and Eurasia she and her colleagues “warned” Bush that “Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.”Oh, there's some historical background to all this? Some context? Wait I'm told every day this crisis just happened because Putin went crazy and wants to rebuild the USSR / Russian Empire.
Thursday, March 03, 2022
Manifold Podcast #6: Richard Sander on Affirmative Action, Mismatch Theory, and Academic Freedom
Wednesday, March 02, 2022
Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information (Physics Letters B published version)
Quantum hair and black hole information
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physletb.2022.136995
Abstract
It has been shown that the quantum state of the graviton field outside a black hole horizon carries information about the internal state of the hole. We explain how this allows unitary evaporation: the final radiation state is a complex superposition which depends linearly on the initial black hole state. Under time reversal, the radiation state evolves back to the original black hole quantum state. Formulations of the information paradox on a fixed semiclassical geometry describe only a small subset of the evaporation Hilbert space, and do not exclude overall unitarity.The earlier paper, which established the existence of quantum hair, has been accepted by PRL and should also appear soon.
4. Conclusion
Hawking's information paradox has been the focus of intense interest for almost 50 years. In his 1992 lecture on the subject, John Preskill wrote [5]
I conclude that the information loss paradox may well presage a revolution in fundamental physics.
The resolution described here is conservative: the quantum state of the exterior gravity field is determined by the interior black hole state, allowing the latter to influence Hawking radiation produced at the horizon. Two distinct quantum states of the black hole may produce the same semiclassical external geometry, but the graviton states differ at the quantum level. The relationship between interior and exterior quantum states is not governed by classical no-hair theorems. Indeed, it has gradually been appreciated that gravity itself prevents the localization of quantum information [4], [9], [10], [11], [21], [22], [23], even behind a horizon. We stress that all formulations of the paradox require a degree of factorization between the black hole internal state and the radiation (see, e.g., (6)), which is clearly not true of our equation (4).
Certain aspects of our expressions (2)-(4) are very clear: the black hole information is spread over many branches of the final radiation state, and macroscopic superpositions of different spacetime geometries play a role in the evaporation. Some of the difficulty in resolving the paradox may originate from a reluctance to accept these aspects of quantum dynamics.
Thursday, February 24, 2022
ManifoldOne Podcast Episode #5: Shai Carmi (Hebrew University): Polygenic risk scores & embryo screening
Thursday, February 17, 2022
ManifoldOne Podcast Episode#4: Jon Y (Asianometry) on Semiconductor Tech and U.S.-China Competition
Thursday, February 10, 2022
ManifoldOne Podcast Episode#3: Richard Hanania on Wokeness, Public Choice Theory, & Geostrategy
Tuesday, February 08, 2022
Black Hole Information and Quantum Hair: seminar video and slides
Has Hawking's Black Hole Information Paradox Been Resolved? Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information
Abstract: In 1976 Stephen Hawking argued that black holes cause pure states to evolve into mixed states. Put another way, quantum information that falls into a black hole does not escape in the form of radiation. Rather, it vanishes completely from our universe, thereby violating a fundamental property of quantum mechanics called unitarity. I give a pedagogical introduction to this paradox, suitable for non-experts. Then I discuss recent results concerning the quantum state of the gravitational field of a compact matter source. These results demonstrate the existence of quantum hair, violating the classical No Hair Theorems. I then discuss how this quantum hair affects Hawking radiation, allowing unitary evaporation of black holes.
Saturday, February 05, 2022
Annals of Psychometry: Wordcels and Shape Rotators
It is nothing more than the calculus of words.Yet there are people who have nothing more than the calculus of words with which to build their models of the world. See Bounded Cognition, and Oppenheimer:
Mathematics is "an immense enlargement of language, an ability to talk about things which in words would be simply inaccessible."
There are many verbally gifted writers and speakers that, when pressed to visualize some math problem in their mind's eye, must helplessly watch their normally high-octane intelligence sputter and fail. They often write or talk at a blistering clip, and can navigate complex mazes of abstractions — and yet, when it comes time to make contact with the real world or accomplish practical tasks, they may be helpless. They'll do great in English class, and terrible in Physics. They can be very fun to listen to due to their terrifying leaps in logic and the exceptional among them will be natural leaders.
The wordcel moniker describes more than just one’s level of verbal skill: it’s also a socioeconomic classifier that refers to people whose verbal ability borders on self-sabotage (thus the “-cel”). Perhaps they’re driven mad by political rage, postmodernism, and disconnection from reality. It might refer to the priestly figures who work in the culture factories of the New York Times with their incomes and social prestige both precipitously declining only for the unperturbed masses on the internet to tell them in unison: “learn to code”! There’s even an implication that these folks are entirely rent-seekers (wrong, but directionally interesting).
...
The shape rotators have been a minor force until very recent history. Though they’ve produced a significant portion of human progress through feats of engineering excellence, they were rarely celebrated until the dawn of the Enlightenment, perhaps 500 years ago. While the long-lasting glory of the Roman aqueducts is renowned to this day, nobody knows the chief engineer behind the project (probably Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, but who’s counting). Today their stock is climbing to the moon. The world’s richest (self-made) men are almost uniformly engineers, computer scientists, or physicists. Vast portions of society that in a prior age might have been organized by government bureaucrats or private sector shot-callers have been handed over to cybernetic self-organizing systems designed and run by mathematical wizards. We have been witness to the slow, and then rapid transfer of power from the smooth-talking Don Drapers of boardroom acclaim to the multi-armed bandits of Facebook Ads.
It’s clear that these big tech CEOs are verbally gifted, but by affinity and by practice they are in the rotator camp. Elon continually attributes his success to studying physics in college. Zuck programmed the original iteration of Facebook himself. Larry & Sergei did an entire PhD in linear algebra based information retrieval, a platonic ideal of shape rotation. Of the ten largest companies in the world, several are driven by fundamental technical breakthroughs. Society at large seems to respect and fear the forces of technology more and more as its cultural and financial capital rises.
This figure displays the math, verbal and spatial scores of gifted children tested at age 12, and their eventual college majors and career choices. This group is cohort 2 of the SMPY/SVPY study: each child scored better than 99.5 percentile on at least one of the M-V sections of the SAT.3. There are systematic differences in cognitive abilities and profiles in different fields (business, medicine, engineering, physics, etc.)

Scores are normalized in units of SDs, within this cohort of gifted children. (So above and below average are defined with respect to the gifted population of >99th percentile kids, not relative to the general population.) The vertical axis is V, the horizontal axis is M, and the length of the arrow reflects spatial ability: pointing to the right means above the group average, to the left means below average; note the arrow for business majors should be twice as long as indicated but there was not enough space on the diagram. The spatial score is obviously correlated with the M score. More data here.
SMPY helps to establish a number of important facts about individuals of high ability:
1. We can (at least crudely) differentiate between individuals at the 99th, 99.9th and 99.99th percentiles. Exceptional talent can be identified through testing, even at age 13.
2. Probability of significant accomplishment, such as STEM PhD, patents awarded, tenure at leading research university, exceptional income, etc. continues to rise as ability level increases, even within the top 1%.
3. There are systematic differences in cognitive abilities and profiles in different fields (business, medicine, engineering, physics, etc.)
4. Men and women of exceptional ability differ in life aspirations and preferences.
No one can claim to understand high level human capital, technological innovation, scientific progress, or exceptional achievement without first familiarizing themselves with these results.
Needless to say, I think this Research Associate position will entail important and fascinating work.
Research Associate:Some relevant figures based on SMPY results of Lubinski, Benbow, and collaborators. See links above for more discussion of the data displayed.
The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) seeks a full-time post-doctoral Research Associate for study oversight, conducting research, writing articles, laboratory management, and statistical analyses using the vast SMPY data base. SMPY is a four-decade longitudinal study consisting of 5 cohorts and over 5,000 intellectually talented participants. One chief responsibility of this position will be to manage laboratory details associated with launching an age-50 follow-up of two of SMPY’s most exceptional cohorts: a cohort of 500 profoundly gifted participants initially identified by age 13 in the early 1980s, and a second cohort of over 700 top STEM graduate students identified and psychologically profiled in 1992 as first- and second-year graduate students. Candidates with interests in assessing individual differences, talent development, and particularly strong statistical-technical skills are preferred. Send vitae, cover letter stating interests, (pre)reprints, and three letters of recommendation to: Dean Camilla P. Benbow, Department of Psychology & Human Development, 0552 Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, 37203. The position will remain open until a qualified applicant is selected. For additional information, please contact either co-director: Camilla P. Benbow, camilla.benbow@vanderbilt.edu, or David Lubinski, david.lubinski@vanderbilt.edu.
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/Peabody/SMPY/. Vanderbilt University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.
We are aiming for a June 30th start date but that’s flexible.
Thursday, February 03, 2022
ManifoldOne podcast Episode#2: Steve Hsu Q&A
Sunday, January 30, 2022
Genetic risk factors have a substantial impact on healthy life years (FinnGen)
Genetic risk factors have a substantial impact on healthy life years
Sakari Jukarainen et al.
The impact of genetic variation on overall disease burden has not been comprehensively evaluated. Here we introduce an approach to estimate the effect of different types of genetic risk factors on disease burden quantified through disability-adjusted life years (DALYs, “lost healthy life years”). We use genetic information from 735,748 individuals with registry-based follow-up of up to 48 years. At the individual level, rare variants had higher effects on DALYs than common variants, while common variants were more relevant for population-level disease burden. Among common variants, rs3798220 (LPA) had the strongest effect, with 1.18 DALYs attributable to carrying 1 vs 0 copies of the minor allele. Belonging to top 10% vs bottom 90% of a polygenic score for multisite chronic pain had an effect of 3.63 DALYs. Carrying a deleterious rare variant in LDLR, MYBPC3, or BRCA1/2 had an effect of around 4.1-13.1 DALYs. The population-level disease burden attributable to some common variants is comparable to the burden from modifiable risk factors such as high sodium intake and low physical activity. Genetic risk factors can explain a sizeable number of healthy life years lost both at the individual and population level, highlighting the importance of incorporating genetic information into public health efforts.
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