Picking Embryos With Best Health Odds Sparks New DNA Debate (Bloomberg Technology)

Bloomberg Technology covers polygenic embryo screening. Note, baby Aurea is well over a year old now. 

I am informed by Genomic Prediction's CEO that the company does genetic testing for ~200 IVF clinics on 6 continents. The overall scale of activity is increasing rapidly and also covers more traditional testing such as PGT-A (testing for aneuploidy or chromosomal normality) and testing for monogenic conditions, PGT-M. Here, PGT = Preimplantation Genetic Testing (standard terminology in IVF). 

I believe that polygenic screening, or PGT-P, will become very common in the near future. It is natural for parents to want as much information as possible to select the embryo that will become their child, and all of these types of testing can be performed simultaneously by GP using the same standard cell biopsy. Currently ~60% of all IVF embryos produced in the US (millions per year, worldwide) undergo some kind of genetic testing.

Picking Embryos With Best Health Odds Sparks New DNA Debate

By Carey Goldberg

Rafal Smigrodzki won’t make a big deal of it, but someday, when his toddler daughter Aurea is old enough to understand, he plans to explain that she likely made medical history at the moment of her birth.

Aurea appears to be the first child born after a new type of DNA testing that gave her a “polygenic risk score.” It’s based on multiple common gene variations that could each have tiny effects; together, they create higher or lower odds for many common diseases.

Her parents underwent fertility treatment in 2019 and had to choose which of four IVF embryos to implant. They turned to a young company called Genomic Prediction and picked the embryo given the best genetic odds of avoiding heart disease, diabetes and cancer in adulthood.

Smigrodzki, a North Carolina neurologist with a doctorate in human genetics, argues that parents have a duty to give a child the healthiest possible start in life, and most do their best. “Part of that duty is to make sure to prevent disease -- that’s why we give vaccinations,” he said. “And the polygenic testing is no different. It’s just another way of preventing disease.”

The choice was simple for him, but recent dramatic advances in the science of polygenic risk scoring raise issues so complex that The New England Journal of Medicine in July published a special report on the problems with using it for embryo selection.

‘Urgent’ Debate

The paper points to a handful of companies in the U.S. and Europe that already are offering embryo risk scores for conditions including schizophrenia, breast cancer and diabetes. It calls for an “urgent society-wide conversation.”

“We need to talk about what sort of regulation we want to have in this space,” said co-author Daniel Benjamin, an economist specializing in genetics -- or “genoeconomist” -- at UCLA.

Unlike the distant prospect of CRISPR-edited designer babies,“this is happening, and it is now,” he said. Many claims by companies that offer DNA-based eating or fitness advice are “basically bunk,” he added, “but this is real. The benefits are real, and the risks are real.”

Among the problems the journal article highlights: Most genetic data is heavily Eurocentric at this point, so parents with other ancestry can’t benefit nearly as much. The science is so new that huge unknowns remain. And selection could exacerbate health disparities among races and classes.

The article also raises concerns that companies marketing embryo selection over-promise, using enticements of “healthy babies” when the scores are only probabilities, not guarantees -- and when most differences among embryos are likely to be very small.

The issues are so complicated and new that the New England Journal article’s 13 authors held differing views on how polygenic embryo scoring should be regulated, said co-first author Patrick Turley, a University of Southern California economist. But all agreed that “potential consumers need to understand what they’re signing up for,” he said. 

...

I have thought this outcome inevitable since laboratory methods became advanced enough to obtain an accurate and inexpensive human genotype from a sample equivalent to the DNA in a few cells (2012 blog post). The information obtained can now be used to predict characteristics of the individual, with applications in assisted reproduction, health science, and even criminal forensics (Othram, Inc.).

Related:

Polygenic Embryo Screening: comments on Carmi et al. and Visscher et al. (discussion of the NEJM paper described in the Bloomberg article). 

First Baby Born from a Polygenically Screened Embryo (video panel) 

Embryo Screening for Polygenic Disease Risk: Recent Advances and Ethical Considerations (Genes 2021 Special Issue)

Carey Goldberg is Boston bureau chief for Bloomberg. She appears in this recent WBUR On Point episode with Kathryn Paige Harden:

 

Compare to this 2013 "Genius Babies" episode of On Point in which I appeared.

   

War Nerd on US-China-Taiwan

Highly recommended. Read this article, which will enable you to ignore 99% of mass media and 90% of "expert" commentary on this topic.

THE WAR NERD: TAIWAN — THE THUCYDIDES TRAPPER WHO CRIED WOOF 

... The US/NATO command may be woofing just to get more ships and planes funded, but woofing can go badly wrong. The people you’re woofing at may think you really mean it. That’s what came very close to happening in the 1983 Able Archer NATO exercises. The woofing by Reagan and Thatcher in the leadup to those exercises was so convincing to the Soviet woof-ees that even the moribund USSR came close to responding in real—like nuclear—ways.

That’s how contingency plans, domestic political theatrics, and funding scams can feed into each other and lead to real wars.

Military forces develop contingency plans. That’s part of their job. Some of the plans to fight China are crazy, but some are just plausible enough to be worrying, because somebody might start thinking they could work. 

... What you do with a place like Xinjiang, if you’re a CIA/DoD planner, is file it under “promote insurgency” — meaning “start as many small fires as possible,” rather than “invade and begin a conventional war.”

And in the meantime, you keep working on the real complaints of the Uyghur and other non-Han ethnic groups, so that if you do need to start a conventional war in the Formosa Straits, you can use the Uyghur as a diversion, a sacrifice, by getting them to rise up and be massacred. Since there’s a big Han-Chinese population in Xinjiang, as the map shows, you can hope to stir up the sort of massacre/counter-massacre whipsaw that leaves evil memories for centuries, leading to a permanent weakening of the Chinese state.

This is a nasty strategy, but it’s a standard imperial practice, low-cost — for the empire, not the local population, of course. It costs those people everything, but empires are not sentimental about such things. 

... The Uyghur in Xinjiang would serve the same purpose as the Iraqi Kurds: “straw dogs destined for sacrifice.” If you want to get really cynical, consider that the reprisals they’d face from an enraged Chinese military would be even more useful to the US/NATO side than their doomed insurgency itself.

Atrocity propaganda is very important in 21st c warfare. At the moment, there’s no evidence of real, mass slaughter in Xinjiang, yet we’re already getting propaganda claims about it. Imagine what US/NATO could make out of the bloody aftermath of a doomed insurgency. Well, assuming that US/NATO survived a war with China, a pretty dicey assumption. More likely, CNN, BBC, and NYT would be the first to welcome our new overlords, Kent Brockman style. Those mainstream-media whores aren’t too bright but Lord, they’re agile. 

... Xinjiang, by contrast, can easily be imagined as One Giant Concentration Camp. After all, our leading “expert” on the province has never been there, and neither have his readers.

... The era of naval war based on carrier groups is over. They know that, even if they won’t say it.

If there’s a real war with China, the carriers will wait it out in San Diego harbor. I don’t say Honolulu, because even that wouldn’t be safe enough.

I’m not denigrating the courage or dedication of the crews and officers of USN vessels. At any level below JCOS, most of them are believers. But their belief is increasingly besieged and difficult to sustain, like an Episcopalian at Easter. You just can’t think too long about how cheap and effective antiship missiles are and still be a believer in aircraft carriers. As platforms of gunboat diplomacy against weak powers, they’re OK. 

... The thing is, and it’s weird you even have to say this: China is a big strong country coming out of an era of deep national humiliation and suffering, proud of its new prosperity. China’s success in lifting a desperately poor population into something like prosperity will likely be the biggest story from this era, when the canonical histories get distilled.

A nation hitting this stage is likely to include a lot of people, especially young men, who are itching to show what their country can do. Their patriotic eagerness is no doubt as gullible as most, but it’s real, and if you pay any attention in the online world, you can’t help seeing it.

People who mouth off about China never seem to imagine that anyone in China might hear, because as we are told over and over again, China-is-an-authoritarian-state. The implication is that nobody in China has any of the nationalistic fervor that we take for granted in our own Anglo states.

... Given the history of US/China relations, from the pogroms against Chinese immigrants to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, through the demonization of Chinese mainlanders in the Cold War (which I remember distinctly from elementary school scare movies), the endless attempts to start insurgencies in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Fujian, to the nonstop violence and abuse of Asians in America, you don’t need to find reasons for Chinese people to want a war.

The odd thing is that most of them don’t seem to. That’s a remarkable testimony to the discipline and good sense of the Chinese public…so far. And it’s also, if you’re thinking clearly, a good reason not to keep provoking China in such gross, pointless ways. A population with that level of discipline and unity, matched with zooming prosperity, technical expertise, and pride on emerging from a long nightmare, is not one to woof at.

Of course the plan in the Pentagon is not real war. The plan is to slow China down, trip it up, “wrong-foot it” as they say in the Commonwealth. 

... So what will China do about Taiwan? China could take it right now, if it wanted to pay the price. Everyone knows that, though many fake-news sites have responded with childish, ridiculous gung-ho stories about how “Taiwan Could Win.” 

But will China invade? No. Not right now anyway. It doesn’t need to. The Chinese elite has its own constituencies, like all other polities (including “totalitarian” ones), and has to answer to them as circumstances change. 

So far China has been extraordinarily patient, a lot more patient than we’d be if China was promising to fight to the death for, say, Long Island. But that can change. Because, as I never tire of repeating, the enemy of the moment has constituencies too. And has to answer to them. 

So what happens if the US succeeds in hamstringing China’s economy? Welp, what’s the most reliable distraction a gov’t can find when it wants to unite a hard-pressed population against some distant enemy? 

That’s when China might actually do something about Taiwan. ...

See also Strategic Calculus of a Taiwan Invasion.

Note Added: Some readers may be alarmed that the War Nerd does not seem to accept the (Western) mass media propaganda about Xinjiang. Those readers might have poor memories, or are too young to know about, e.g., fake WMD or "babies taken out of incubators" or the countless other manufactured human rights abuses we read about in reliable journals like the New York Times or Washington Post.

Take these recent examples of US journalism on Afghanistan: 

The fake drone strike that killed 10 innocent family members, one of our last acts as we abandoned Afghanistan. (Fake because we probably did it just to show we could "strike back" at the bad guys.) Non-Western media reported this as a catastrophic failure almost immediately. But very few people in the US knew it until the Pentagon issued an apology in a late Friday afternoon briefing just recently. 

The drone strike was in retaliation for the suicide bombing at Kabul airport, in which (as reported by the Afghan government) ~200 people died. But evidence suggests that only a small fraction of these people were killed by bomb -- most of the 200 may have been shot by US and "coalition" (Turkish?) soldiers who might have panicked after the bombing. This is covered widely outside the US but not here.

If you want to understand the incredibly thin and suspicious sourcing of the "Uighur genocide" story, see here or just search for Adrian Zenz. 

Just a few years ago there were plenty of Western travelers passing through Xinjiang, even by bicycle, vlogging and posting their videos on YouTube. I followed these YouTubers at the time because of my own travel interest in western and south-western China, not for any political reason.

If you watch just a few of these you'll get an entirely different impression of the situation on the ground than you would get from Western media. For more, see this comment thread:

I want to be clear that because PRC is an authoritarian state their reaction to the Islamic terror attacks in Xinjiang circa 2015 was probably heavy handed and I am sure some of the sad stories told about people being arrested, held without trial, etc. are true. But I am also sure that if you visit Xinjiang and ask (non-Han) taxi drivers, restaurant owners, etc. about the level of tension you will get a very different impression than what is conveyed by Western media. 

... 

No nation competing in geopolitics is without sin. One aspect of that sin (both in US and PRC): use of mass media propaganda to influence domestic public opinion. 

If you want to be "reality based" you need to look at the strongest evidence from both sides. 

...

Note to the credulous: The CIA venture fund InQTel was an investor in my first startup, which worked in crypto technology. We worked with CIA, VOA, NED ("National Endowment for Democracy" HA HA HA) on defeating the PRC firewall in the early internet era. I know a fair bit about how this all works -- NGO cutouts, fake journalists, policy grifters in DC, etc. etc. Civilians have no idea. 

At the time I felt (and still sort of feel) that keeping the internet free and open is a noble cause. But do I know FOR SURE that state security works DIRECTLY with media and NGOs to distort the truth (i.e., lies to the American people, Iraq WMD yada yada). Yes, I know for sure and it's easy to detect the pattern just by doing a tiny bit of research on people like Cockerell or Zenz. 

... 

Keep in mind I'm not a "dove" -- MIC / intel services / deep state *has to* protect against worst case outcomes and assume the worst about other states. 

They have to do nasty stuff. I'm not making moral judgements here. But a *consequence* of this is that you have to be really careful about information sources in order to stay reality based...

Men Without Women

This short story has it all -- genetic genealogy, ultra high net worth physics quant banker, stripper, cop, marriage, family, New Yorker writer. It's fiction, but based on real characters and stories. 

There is an audio version, read by the author, at the link.

Satellites by Rebecca Curtis (The New Yorker July 5, 2021) 

My husband and Tony were anxiety-ridden workaholics who’d focussed, from a young age, on earning cash. Tony wanted enough for a good life; Conor, enough to feel safe. They were fifty-six years old, though Conor looked forty-five and Tony thirty-five. They were meticulous, but owing to oversights they’d each had five kids by four women. They were two nerds from New Hampshire. ... 

His ancestors, he told me, had founded America. He’d started working at age twelve, as a farmhand, and eventually acquired a Ph.D. in quantum physics from Harvard, then served for decades as the “head quant” at a world-renowned investment bank. But he wasn’t smart enough to be skeptical when go-go dancers said, Don’t worry, I’m on the pill. ... 

After high school, Tony turned down a scholarship to the University of New Hampshire. He wanted to work. He did active duty in the Marines for eight years, then served in the Air National Guard for twenty while working as a cop. Now he collected his police pension and, for fun, drove a delivery truck. 

... 

Conor smiled. By the way, he said, had Tony ever done 23andMe or Ancestry.com? 

Tony squinted. Ancestry. Sinead bought them kits for his birthday. Why? 

Conor peered up at Jupiter, approaching Saturn for the great conjunction, and the murky dimmer stars. I studied shuttered restaurants. A few bars had created outdoor dining rooms and were busy; the 7-Eleven was dark, but the ever-glowing “Fortune Teller!” sign on the adjacent cottage was lit. 

No reason, Conor said. Had Tony, he asked, opted into his family DNA tree, to see his matches who’d already done Ancestry? Or elected to receive text alerts whenever some new supposed relative signed on? 

Tony walked swiftly. Nah, he said. He’d done Ancestry to make Sinead happy. He shrugged. She’d made their accounts, he said. She probably opted him in; he wasn’t sure. 

When we got home, Tony’s phone had twenty missed calls. 

...

Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway 1927. "Hemingway begins to examine the themes that would occupy his later works: the casualties of war, the often uneasy relationship between men and women, ..."

Rebecca Curtis interview

In “Satellites,” your story in the Fiction Issue, a woman and her husband, a retired banker, host the husband’s friend at their Jersey-shore mansion. The woman is a frustrated writer, and, to inspire her, her husband, Conor, asks the friend, Tony, a retired police officer, to tell her cop stories. How would you describe the woman’s views of these two men? 

The narrator is awed by how smart Tony and her husband are, and by how hard they work. She’s impressed that they’ve read so much and educated themselves about so many diverse topics while performing demanding and often unpleasant jobs, and by the fact that they’re two of the most generous, kind people she knows. She appreciates that they’ve maintained lifelong friendships, something that she wishes she’d done herself. She doesn’t agree with all their political ideas. Earlier in her life, she believed that, one, bankers cared about money but not about art, literature, world hunger, etc.; and, two, that anyone who supported Trumpish policies (or who voted for anyone like Trump) must be an ignorant jerk. Meeting her husband (and Tony) punctured those beliefs. 

The narrator views herself as the proverbial grasshopper: someone—possibly frivolous, vapid, and solipsistic—who wants to enjoy her life, sing, dance, make “art,” while working various hip-but-not-very-remunerative jobs to pay rent, never truly planning for winter. Tony and Conor are ants: anxious, alert to the dangers the world can pose, doing difficult (and sneered-upon) jobs diligently so they’ll be protected when scarcity comes. The narrator aspires to be more ant-like while remaining a grasshopper. 

Tony and Conor are, in some ways, obsessed with genetics and lineage—they discuss Ancestry.com and bloodlines—but their own families (they each have five children by four women) are somewhat of a disappointment, or even an afterthought, to them. Can you say a little about that tension? 

Conor and Tony suffer because—in several cases—they don’t have the ability to see their children. In the case of divorce, a time-sharing agreement may be in place, but, if the mother has principal custody and won’t permit the father’s visits, what can the father do? Possession sometimes is nine-tenths of the law. Hiring lawyers and going to court to try to force a mother who won’t honor custody agreements to do so requires copious energy, oodles of spare time, and a small fortune. Conor and Tony care deeply about their children, but they’ve lost control—in some cases, of seeing their kids, and, in others, of influencing them. They may feel powerless.

PGT-P with Elizabeth Carr and Dr. Serena Chen

 

This is a discussion of Preimplantation Genetic Testing in IVF with Dr. Serena Chen (IRMS and Rutgers medical school) and Elizabeth Carr (first US IVF baby, fertility patient advocate). 

We mostly focus on polygenic embryo screening, or PGT-P, but at the end I discuss some recent results showing that Genomic Prediction's aneuploidy test (PGT-A, which screens for chromosomal issues, such as trisomy 21) is more accurate than other existing technologies and leads to significantly higher pregnancy success rates. The results, which were obtained independently (not by GP) in a large sample size study, will be presented at the annual American Society of Reproductive Medicine meeting in October. 

This is a video version of the podcast.

Chinese Air Power: Justin Bronk RUSI UK

 

This is a good overview. Bronk (Research Fellow for Airpower and Technology in the Military Sciences team at Royal United Services Institute, UK) is good, Rupprecht also. (See show notes for links.)

However, both are looking at open source information and someone fluent in Mandarin with a technical background can do even better. 

Just a few notes for now -- I may revisit to add more detailed analysis. 

1. J10 and J20 are world class fighters, largely indigenously designed. J16 is best flanker variant in the world today. 

2. PLAAF missiles (PL12, PL15, cruise missiles, etc.): some argue that PL12 and PL15 are among the best AAM in the world right now. Note use of AESA seeker in individual missiles while IIRC Russians have not incorporated AESA radar in their fighters yet. 

3. WS10 and WS15 engines nearly mature -- WS10 now deployed in single engine J10. 

4. Note remarks about S400 sales to PRC and relatively small gap between PRC SAMs / air defense and Russian systems. 

5. Individual fighter characteristics are becoming less important compared to missile and sensor technology. For example, the low cost JF-17 (co-developed by PRC and Pakistan) is respectable (roughly comparable to early F-16 capabilities) as a plane, but with its block 3 sensor package and PL-12/15 missiles is competitive with much more expensive generation 4+ fighters. The fighter (eventually, drone or UCAV) becomes just a sensor and missile platform...

6. Slightly off-topic: I think the window for utility of stealth is closing fast as radar technology improves. Ubiquitous drones (which can, for example, image stealth opponents from above or behind) and sensor fusion mean that stealth missions over enemy territory against a peer opponent with good SAMs/air defense look very risky.

The two very obvious and critical technology gaps between PRC and the West were jet engines and semiconductors. It looks like both are on a clear trajectory to close in the next ~5y or so. My guess is that PRC military radar (EM hardware and hardware/software for post-processing), missile technology, and AI/ML are already on par with the US. Sensors, Missiles/Drones, and AI/ML will be the most important technologies for warfare in the coming decades. [1] [2]

With effectively no technology gap between US and PRC the military equation tilts in their favor over coming decades. Once a country has developed the full stack of military technology their costs are better estimated in PPP rather than exchange rate units: local costs such as compensation for engineers, factory workers, etc. predominate. Since the PRC economy is already significantly larger than the US economy in PPP terms, and growing faster, they can afford more (new, advanced) military hardware than we can in the coming decades. Add to this that their focus is concentrated in the Asia-Pacific region, while the US spreads its capability over the entire world, and it seems almost inevitable (barring economic collapse) that the military balance of power in the Asia region will shift in favor of PRC.

Kathryn Paige Harden Profile in The New Yorker (Behavior Genetics)

This is a good profile of behavior geneticist Paige Harden (UT Austin professor of psychology, former student of Eric Turkheimer), with a balanced discussion of polygenic prediction of cognitive traits and the culture war context in which it (unfortunately) exists.

Can Progressives Be Convinced That Genetics Matters? 

The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything. 

Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a talented writer who also wrote a very nice article on the NYTimes / Slate Star Codex hysteria last summer.

Some references related to the New Yorker profile:

1. The paper Harden was attacked for sharing while a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation: Game Over: Genomic Prediction of Social Mobility 

2. Harden's paper on polygenic scores and mathematics progression in high school: Genomic prediction of student flow through high school math curriculum 

3. Vox article; Turkheimer and Harden drawn into debate including Charles Murray and Sam Harris: Scientific Consensus on Cognitive Ability?

A recent talk by Harden, based on her forthcoming book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality

Regarding polygenic prediction of complex traits 

I first met Eric Turkheimer in person (we had corresponded online prior to that) at the Behavior Genetics Association annual meeting in 2012, which was back to back with the International Conference on Quantitative Genetics, both held in Edinburgh that year (photos and slides [1] [2] [3]). I was completely new to the field but they allowed me to give a keynote presentation (if memory serves, together with Peter Visscher). Harden may have been at the meeting but I don't recall whether we met. 

At the time, people were still doing underpowered candidate gene studies (there were many talks on this at BGA although fewer at ICQG) and struggling to understand GCTA (Visscher group's work showing one can estimate heritability from modestly large GWAS datasets, results consistent with earlier twins and adoption work). Consequently a theoretical physicist talking about genomic prediction using AI/ML and a million genomes seemed like an alien time traveler from the future. Indeed, I was.

My talk is largely summarized here:

On the genetic architecture of intelligence and other quantitative traits 

https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421 

How do genes affect cognitive ability or other human quantitative traits such as height or disease risk? Progress on this challenging question is likely to be significant in the near future. I begin with a brief review of psychometric measurements of intelligence, introducing the idea of a "general factor" or g score. The main results concern the stability, validity (predictive power), and heritability of adult g. The largest component of genetic variance for both height and intelligence is additive (linear), leading to important simplifications in predictive modeling and statistical estimation. Due mainly to the rapidly decreasing cost of genotyping, it is possible that within the coming decade researchers will identify loci which account for a significant fraction of total g variation. In the case of height analogous efforts are well under way. I describe some unpublished results concerning the genetic architecture of height and cognitive ability, which suggest that roughly 10k moderately rare causal variants of mostly negative effect are responsible for normal population variation. Using results from Compressed Sensing (L1-penalized regression), I estimate the statistical power required to characterize both linear and nonlinear models for quantitative traits. The main unknown parameter s (sparsity) is the number of loci which account for the bulk of the genetic variation. The required sample size is of order 100s, or roughly a million in the case of cognitive ability.

The predictions in my 2012 BGA talk and in the 2014 review article above have mostly been validated. Research advances often pass through the following phases of reaction from the scientific community:

1. It's wrong ("genes don't affect intelligence! anyway too complex to figure out... we hope")

2. It's trivial ("ofc with lots of data you can do anything... knew it all along")

3. I did it first ("please cite my important paper on this")

Or, as sometimes attributed to Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

See also To Predict the Future it is useful to understand the Past.

Technical note: 

In 2014 I estimated that ~1 million genotype | phenotype pairs would be enough to capture most of the common SNP heritability for height and cognitive ability. This was accomplished for height in 2017. However, the sample size of well-phenotyped individuals is much smaller for cognitive ability, even in 2021, than for height in 2017. For example, in UK Biobank the cognitive test is very brief (~5 minutes IIRC, a dozen or so questions), but it has not even been administered to the full cohort as yet. In the Educational Attainment studies the phenotype EA is only moderately correlated (~0.3 ?) or so with actual cognitive ability.

Hence, although the most recent EA4 results use 3 million individuals [1], and produce a predictor which correlates ~0.4 with actual EA, the statistical power available is still less than what I predicted would be required to train a really good cognitive ability predictor.

In our 2017 height paper, which also briefly discussed bone density and cognitive ability prediction, we built a cognitve ability predictor roughly as powerful as EA3 using only ~100k individuals with the noisy UKB test data. So I remain confident that  ~million individuals with good cognitive scores (e.g., SAT, AFQT, full IQ test) would deliver results far beyond what we currently have available. We also found that our predictor, built using actual (albeit noisy) cognitive scores exhibits less power reduction in within-family (sibling) analyses compared to EA. So there is evidence that (no surprise) EA is more influenced by environmental factors, including so-called genetic nurture effects, than is cognitive ability.

A predictor which captures most of the common SNP heritability for cognitive ability might correlate ~0.5 or 0.6 with actual ability. Applications of this predictor in, e.g., studies of social mobility or educational success or even longevity using existing datasets would be extremely dramatic.

US debt, dollar-rmb, digital rmb (Gavekal)

 

I agree with Louis Gave's take on most of the topics discussed. Gavekal manages a China fixed income fund and some other China-focused funds, so he is talking his book. But the arguments stand on their own.

At ~45m, a good discussion of digital RMB and why it will break the technology record for fastest adoption by first 1 billion users. See earlier discussion (Ray Dalio) on de-dollarization and digital RMB here. 

This is a scary graph from Gave's presentation:

This is another good interview: