“What Progress?” Gwern’s 10 year retrospective

Link post

This is a thrilling read. Some favourite lines:

And that was that. The FBI would later pay me some visits, but I was long done with the DNMs and had moved on.

and

The key result was Rietveld et al 2013, the first truly successful IQ GWAS. Rietveld et al 2013 found GWAS hits; further, it found between-sibling differences. (This sibling test would be replicated easily a dozen times by 2020.) Reading it was a revelation. The debate was over: behavioral genetics was right, and the critics were wrong. Kamin, Gould, Lewontin, Shalizi, the whole sorry pack—annihilated. IQ was indeed highly heritable, polygenic, and GWASes would only get better for it, and for all the easier traits as well. (“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; nor as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.”)

and the final line

If I have not always been right from the start, I have at least been less wrong than most in updating faster than most (DNB, behavioral genetics, DL/​DRL).