All Those 23andMe Spit Tests Were Part of a Bigger Plan

It's like sharing your private key, knowing that others also use that private key.

You immediately make a large portion of your family tree discoverable.

It's the same underlying reason that we (most of us lol) treat revenge porn as a bad thing. You take someone else's blanket of privacy away without their consent.

There’s a slight difference.

Close family member of Rich And Successful CEO founds successful company is not an interesting story. In fact it is how most people assume it works, if you come from a rich family of course your company is a success. 'Poor' kid pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps and builds company with nothing but grit and brilliance, now that is a story you can sell. Especially if it's a company doing something the 'experts' said couldn't be done.

Who's Holmes? GP has probably been spending too much time on the grey web.

Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for.

Like pretty much all professions, it's also become far more demanding to be a good journalist or investigative journalist due to how many stories reported on require more specialized knowledge to understand and portray correctly. The bar used to be lower and a journalist could better grasp a situation or understanding. Now, with a lot of technology and science, you pretty much need a pretty deep and well rounded background to properly understand and address issues. The general bar of education has risen, including that of deceitful people, which places even higher demands on journalists to put them in check.

Could dig further into the point but the moral of the story is that the bar is raising to a point where misinformation and disinformation have an edge due to the sheer volume of information, lack of ability for any one person to have enough understanding, and incentives to be deceitful. That means the barrier to entry cost to dig out deceit has often become too high. I'm surprised we see much of any interesting investigative journalism anymore aside from uncovering some of the more obvious and massive schemes. Forget catching clever and sophisticated deceit, you need whistle-blowers for this.

In the "days of yore" the quality of journalism was higher? Journalists regularly omitted things from reporting that was widely known to support popular political narratives or their own ideas of what good outcomes would be, "for the good of the country".

Investigative journalism is alive and probably better than ever before despite being less profitable than wildly irresponsible opinion masquerading as journalism.

Look at the Pulizer Won by the Boston Globe for 2021, lifesaving investigative journalism that is expensive and difficult- and exactly the sort of thing that the Golden Age would have never dug up.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/21109...

I have also got a full 30x sequencing from a bargain offer, but i haven't analyzed those. Never got to it, apart from downloading some app to browse them. Which stresses my point why the analysis that these services could provide is useful.

Descriptions like the above which seek to attack and discredit any form of alternative medicine will always exist because mainstream medical practice first seeks to enrich corporations and only secondarily tries to help patients. (Not on an individual level, but structurally.)

I'd invite you to check out the YouTube channels or any of the books written by Dr. Mark Hyman or Dr. Gundry; the content they put out is incredible and has had a huge positive impact on my life.

Great question! I haven't revisited the question in quite some time, but one possible explanation is sometimes called the "winner's curse." There's a "measurement error" for each site in that genetics is never deterministic, and when you have millions of sites, and only thousands of cases split into yes/no categories. If a particular site explains only 10% of the "yes" cases, it could be that random sampling makes it look like 15% or 7% or whatever. And when you have a handful of sites, each with measurement error of this sort, when you sort the handful of sites, the genomic sites with the biggest effect are likely to come from random chance.

More advanced models have a greater ability to find spurious signals, to overfit the data, and to mispredict. Training with more parameters, correctly, often requires more data, and the biggest limitation to GWAS is the amount of data. For some rare conditions, there may not be bough humans alive to provide the data fully needed, if we are going only by GWAS. Because GWAS doesn't have any model for how cells work, and the naturally occurring variation in the human population is unlikely to provide enough data to reconstruct the relationships that are necessary to rebuild the parts of that physical model in order to make predictions from DNA alone.

There are also potentially different prevalence of causal variants in different populations, depending on the interactions between different genes. In the San Francisco East Bay, there's a mixing of many many previously geographically different human populations. Rare diseases that are most prevalent in one population are starting to present differently when there's admixture with more distantly related humans. The whole combination of minor differences can cause changes to what we think was a well-defined disease.

Point mutations occurring outside SNPs are almost by definition not yet useful. If we know what the gene does or is related to, it's an SNP.

And you store more information than just the raw sequence (quality scores, multiple reads, etc).

But if you’re looking for what is going on in an individual, then yes… SNP chip data isn’t as informative as whole genome (or exome) sequencing.

Do we honestly believe the law would consider the whole score tainted and unusable for all the named purposes? Would it have teeth to do anything about it?

Furthermore, it's easy to end-run around it like they've done with car insurance. Instead of raising the rates of privacy-conscious drivers, we'll raise everyone's rates and then offer "discounts" to people willing to submit to tracking. There, perfectly legal!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT18KJouHWg