A tribute to my father, Lloyd D. Bowerman, who would have been 102 years old today, July 12th, 2024

 

April 20^th

Ano Dos

File Under,

Goes well with coffee;

“Too much to know; The growing difficulty of informed decision-making. Continuing the conversation regarding your child's education-polygenic score (education-PGS) and selected implications for her future”.

A brief recap. – On April 15^th, I posted in social media some thoughts that came to me after I read a published research paper on the use of the presence or absence of certain genes in student’s genetic profile as a useful tool to predict that student’s persistence to stick with the work necessary to complete cumulative mathematics courses in high school in order to succeed in STEM classes. The paper can be found here; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-020-0060-2. While that subject in itself is fascinating, using the paper as a source for discussion of other issues can be a lot of fun too. On April 17^th I revisited the paper to use it as a platform to discuss implications of what knowing our own genetic profile will have in prenatal screening and gene therapy in regards to building our offspring to successfully compete in tomorrow’s world.

So once again we return to the paper as a stage on which to discuss the topic I loosely refer to as “Informed Decision Making”. It is my thinking that, in our lifetime, the influence of scientific barriers crumpling under the onslaught of commercially-driven private research, avenues of humankind evolution either have become available, or will shortly be available that have immense, unprecedented power to drastically alter the evolution of humankind.

Democracy and free-markets have always been understood to be the strongest and most efficient when the citizens, and the voters in particular, have high literacy levels. A literate citizen can discern subtle threats to their democracy, as well as successfully navigate the stalls of commerce as both a buyer and a seller. Knowledge is what keeps you free as well as very, very wealthy. But what if that is no longer true? What if that is no longer even possible? What if it remains true, but only for a shrinking minority of society?

If we go back to the research paper and look at just a couple of snippets, it becomes obvious this paper is going to be understood to only a very small audience, not because of it’s focus but because of the math. Here’s an example;

(Note; I do not expect you to understand even a minute part of what follows. As soon as you become aware you are lost, please skip to bottom of the snippets and continue reading.)

“...However, including family SES and school-SES as covariates attenuated the association between the education-PGS and mathematics tracking in the 9th-grade only by about 20% (attenuated from b = 0.583, SE = 0.035, to b = 0.469, SE = 0.035, 95% CI = [0.397, 0.53], Supplementary Table 3). Note that the association with genetics was roughly comparable in magnitude to the association with family SES. As a stronger test of whether the genetic association with mathematics tracking was due to clustering of students with high education-PGS into certain schools, we repeated our analysis of 9th-grade tracking yet again, this time using school-fixed-effects regression to compare students to their schoolmates (Supplementary Table 3).28 Comparing only students who were in Algebra 1 or below, students with higher education-PGS were less likely, compared to their schoolmates, to be placed in a remedial track (Pre-Algebra or lower) than in Algebra 1 (b = 0.387, SE = 0.054, 95% CI = [0.294, 0.504]). Similarly, comparing only students who were in Algebra 1 or above, students with higher education-PGS were more likely, compared to their schoolmates, to be placed in an advanced track (Geometry or higher) rather than in Algebra 1 (b = 0.587, SE = 0.047, 95% CI = [0.501, 0.681]).

Or another snippet;

Analyses

Our statistical models varied as a function of the outcome variable. For non-categorical outcome variables (e.g., number of advancing steps), we fit baseline generalized linear models of the form

E(yij)=g−1(b0+b1PGSij+controls),E(yij)=g−1(b0+b1PGSij+controls),

(1)

Where I indexes school, j indexes individual, and an appropriate link function g is chosen given the distribution of the outcomey. For analyses of 9th-grade tracking, we fit ordered logistic regressions.61 For analysis of persistence, we used Poisson regressions. We fit interaction models of the form:

E(yij)=g−1⎛⎝b0+b1PGSij+b2SchoolStatusij+b3PGSij⋅SchoolStatusij+controls⎞⎠.

E(yij)=g−1(b0+b1PGSij+b2SchoolStatusij+b3PGSij⋅SchoolStatusij+controls).

(2)

For interaction models, we also included interactions between covariates and the key main effects, so as to guard against spurious findings from specification error.62 Thus, in models examining interactions between the education-PGS and School Status (as in Fig. 4), we also included interactions between PGS and sex, School Status and sex, PGS and birth year, and School Status and birth year (see Supplementary Table 3). Standard errors for key models (Tables S3–S6) are adjusted for school-based clustering using bootstrap resampling of the schools.63

For our ordinal categorical outcomes (e.g., tracking in 9th-grade), we consider cumulative link models.61 As used here, cumulative link models assert that:

Pr(yijk≤j)=f(θj−(b0+b1PGSij+controls)),Pr(yijk≤j)=f(θj−(b0+b1PGSij+controls)),

(3)

Where kin [0,1,…, K] now indexes the category of the outcome y. We used a logit link, rendering this model equivalent to the proportional odds model.64 We again compute cluster-robust standard errors using school-based bootstrap resampling. One key assumption of this model is that the effect of the predictors does not vary across categories. We therefore also present results from alternative models (e.g., adjacent-category logit models) as robustness checks, see Supplement.

Returning to our discussion - How did you feel as you quickly realized you could not understand the slightest of what was said? What if your school system (or for that matter, The US Dept of Education, in Washington DC) was citing this research (and others) to justify a radical change in the way your children are educated and to justify spending a massive amount of money to finance it? The stakes in this poker game are extremely high; Some say to NOT implement this change is to doom our children low wage/no benefits/3rd shift jobs. Others say, this is NOT progress and to implement it will have our children skill levels below what is needed to succeed in the marketplace and doom them to low wage/no benefits/3rd shift jobs.

It is important to understand I’m just using education as an example, this already happening in every aspect of our life; our posture as a voter on global warming, global trade, proper nutrition, transportation modes, freedom of expression, hate speech, social services and public health structure are dependent on being informed on that matter, and I contend that is fast becoming no longer possible.

I KNOW! LETS BRING IN THE EXPERTS!

The trouble is, “First off, There are no experts, and everyone is one”, second, “Truth no longer exists and it too, is everywhere”. Many trends are feeding this dilemma. The pursuit of pure knowledge just for knowledge sake is pretty much extinct. Taking for granted “the betterment of individuals is only assured in the betterment of all”, is no longer a necessary platform plank for winning elections. “It’s quaint, but no longer feasible”. Because of the internet, audiences and markets are now The World. Because of the internet, converting only an infinitesimal percent of the world’s population to becoming True Believers or loyal consumers of a product, can allow for ideas and worldviews and consumption patterns that would have withered due to the lack of local support, to become overnight game changers. The secularization of our thinking, and the monetizing of our research labs results, are in the drivers seat or soon will be. It is in this environment we search for, and turn to experts to make our decisions, or to have them assist us in decision making.

What happens when the expert gatekeepers and the bureaucrats punch out and fail to return?

Gatekeepers (Legitimatizers) and Bureaucrats (Rule minders) have fallen (or jumped) from their pedestals of lofty standards and meticulous rule driven impartiality - the twin pillars of Equality to All before the Law, and a safe, sane, and moral application of those laws. Public service careers for the sake of being part of the betterment of humankind and free of scandal, is openly mocked as being naive. Gatekeeping and bureaucratic positions are increasingly seen as legit stepping stones to developing lucrative relationships with profit driven entities or entities that have a marked ideology agenda.

With that in mind, we’ve lost our source of unbiased experts. We may confidently cite published research only to be shown, “That they used poor statistical methods that allow for bias to come in”. “The entity that published their paper was under the influence of the interests of the party most likely to benefit from wide acceptance of the paper’s conclusion”. Joe Taxpayer no longer has adequate time or resources to locate and analyze unbiased data from which to base his actions. Joe is now weakened to the point he no longer needs to be courted, but merely manipulated.

To Beat a Dead Horse

Information needed to making decisions is either so plentiful you drowned in it, but so diverse in its conclusions as to be worthless, and/or it is so technical you can’t judge it’s integrity or it’s findings on your own, so you are forced to turn to outside experts. It is becoming harder and harder to find experts you can trust. For those with an agenda, a willingness to go more extreme measures is more and more evident. Machiavelli goes unnoticed as The Beatitudes are certified as hate speech and their absence from the curriculum goes unnoticed.

Idea Jerky, chew on this;

Yes I know politics and bureaucracies have a long and well documented history of profiteering and sleaze, of raping the defenseless and enriching powerful. But that that is also why it was called just that, bottom feeding/rape/profiteering. Now it is labeled servicing the poor, student debt, and managing vs curing disease, aka business modeled healthcare.

More later, “Is a current world population of 7.7B and a projected 2050 population of 9.9B a sign we need to abandon free markets and individualism and endorse planned/managed economics as well as monitor speech and regulate news?