Scott Alexander, curated
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Things I Don’t Understand About Genetics (A Non-Exhaustive List)

Quality
64
Strong
Claude Shift
40
Moderate
RWI
1
of 10

Summary

An 'I'm confused, please explain' post posing genuine genetics puzzles. The sharpest: the polygenic-variance paradox -- if IQ is highly heritable but each SNP explains ~0.02%, implying 5000+ loci, then (by the casino-coins / binomial analogy) human intelligence should vary far LESS than it actually does, unless total possible variation is huge or the additive model is wrong. Also puzzles over why traits aren't more correlated under mutational load, and the mechanism of the paternal-age effect (why generation-splitting should matter for mutation accumulation).

Why this score

Quality 64 · Strong. Strong (64). Lifted by genuinely sharp, well-posed puzzles and strong quantitative intuition (the casino-coins framing of the polygenic-variance paradox is a real insight even when framed as confusion); capped because it's an unresolved question-post with no thesis or payoff. Scored on merit without early-cohort compression (2013).

Claude’s paradigm shift 40 · Moderate. Moderate (40). Poses puzzles rather than advancing ideas; the casino-coins framing of polygenic variance is a mildly fresh way to see the issue.

Real-world impact 1 · Negligible. 1 -- negligible. A genetics-puzzle blog post; within-blog, no material footprint.