How solid is DIY HBD? Identical twins try home DNA tests. Not only do they get different results from different companies, but 23andMe gives the twins different results. 23andMe's explanation when caught: "its algorithm", "statistical estimates"
(https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dna-ancestry-kits-twins-marketplace-1.4980976)
Foucault was all about critiquing the notion of categories as defined by science (esp when applied to biology) and how they served the interests of power
This a textbook example of how the seemingly objective algorithms are anything but because of what went in to making them
I mean it is just “its algorithm” and “statistical estimates” at work
here right, measuring a meaningful notion of distance between pairs of
(estimates of) dna sequences isn’t straightforward (if anyone tells you
otherwise grab your copy of “Computational Optimal Transport” and beat
them with it until they acquiesce) and if you’re doing any sort of
clustering or factor analysis in one of the spaces implied by those
distances then even small changes in the input sequence can have a big
effect, and real biologists know this (this much should be immediately
obvious to computer scientists or anyone who has worked with word
embeddings or machine learning or dimensionality reduction) and already
know to be careful reporting results.
the point is more that this type of result is pretty normal, there's a lot of unintuitive things that happen when you start trying to either measure the differences between high-dimensional objects or to project them down to some manageable dimension to work with, and the point isn't that it's impossible to measure differences between genetic sequences it's just that the choice of how you do that isn't something that can be decided on scientifically which is where the "it's more art than science" statement comes in and part of why you have to be very judicious in presenting your results.
This is inevitable considering that these companies use proprietary
reference samples. It’s not really a secret flaw in the method unless
you don’t understand how it works.
Are you claiming it's not a flaw, or are you claiming something else?
'Cos it looks like a goddamn huge flaw in the basic claim - that you can give a meaningful answer to this question from a DNA sample.
also, the twin dilemma
It can't give you any meaningful percentages of ethnicity or nationality. It's a practical but imperfect way of determining geographic ancestry in a probabilistic manner. The marketing claims to do the first (i.e., you can just toss DNA samples into a magic black box) but anyone who knows how it works knows it can only do the second thing.
*laughs in Foucault*
Literal phrenology with a side of surrendering your genetic privacy.
from this tweet: https://twitter.com/timmaughan/status/1086249171240316928
check the replies and see if you can pick which are from people who bought into their 23andMe results bigtime
I mean it is just “its algorithm” and “statistical estimates” at work here right, measuring a meaningful notion of distance between pairs of (estimates of) dna sequences isn’t straightforward (if anyone tells you otherwise grab your copy of “Computational Optimal Transport” and beat them with it until they acquiesce) and if you’re doing any sort of clustering or factor analysis in one of the spaces implied by those distances then even small changes in the input sequence can have a big effect, and real biologists know this (this much should be immediately obvious to computer scientists or anyone who has worked with word embeddings or machine learning or dimensionality reduction) and already know to be careful reporting results.
This is inevitable considering that these companies use proprietary reference samples. It’s not really a secret flaw in the method unless you don’t understand how it works.
Legit, there are people who aren’t doing this for the medical data?