Depression-Gene Studies Were Built on Shaky Foundations

But a single gene as a possible cause isn't surprising given other more extreme single gene effects with other cognitive and developmental effects - angelman syndrome is marked for its cheerfulness and niceness.

If you were seeking such a gene you would search for anomalous histories of suicides in a family tree.

And that's on harder sciences. In soft sciences (and liberal arts, etc) it's the wild west -- what gets more grants and is more popular at the moment gets priority and is "proved".

We're discussing his criticism of how a ton of "real psychiatrists" got some major things wrong. This criticism stands or falls on its merits, not on his status as a "real psychiatrist". You don't need to be a "real psychiatrist" in order to this sort of analysis (and, it turns out, a ton of "real psychiatrists" got this wrong in the past).

This is like reading a cooking blog by someone who says they're an auto mechanic, and demanding proof that they really know how to fix cars before you'll listen to them talk about pie crusts. If they're not claiming special expertise in the area (and he isn't), the credentials don't matter.

Eg, Scott writes:

> Border et al focus this infrastructure on 5-HTTLPR and its fellow depression genes, scanning a sample of 600,000+ people and using techniques twenty years more advanced than most of the studies above had access to. They claim to be able to simultaneously test almost every hypothesis ever made about 5-HTTLPR, including “main effects of polymorphisms and genes, interaction effects on both the additive and multiplicative scales and, in G3E analyses, considering multiple indices of environmental exposure (e.g., traumatic events in childhood or adulthood)”. What they find is…nothing.

I mean, either he's right or he's wrong, and you could go read the paper yourself and find out. Or you can trust other people who have read the paper. Or, I dunno, you could ask one of the authors of the paper if they think Scott's summary is any good:

> I have never in my career read a synopsis of a paper I've (co-)written that is better than the original paper. Until now. I have no clue who this person is or what this blog is about, but this simply nails every aspect of the issue

(Source: https://twitter.com/matthewckeller/status/112638089124318822...)

And again, none of this has anything to do with his status as a psychiatrist. You shouldn't blindly trust a blog post about this topic just because the author is verifiably a psychiatrist, but you shouldn't blindly distrust one just because they are not.

No, you replied to me. My comment was it is strange that this Atlantic article cites him as "the psychiatrist Scott Alexander" because that is a pen name, and it isn't verifiable that he is a psychiatrist due to his anonymity.

Your refutation of my point is "it doesn't matter that it isn't verifiable", but that was part of my point. You can't just toss it out, that's being intellectually dishonest.

Any piece of journalism that cites a person should do so only if they can verify the source. Journalists who skip this step means at least a portion of their article is fake news.

> You shouldn't blindly trust a blog post about this topic just because the author is verifiably a psychiatrist, but you shouldn't blindly distrust one just because they are not

This has nothing to do with my point, which is all about how The Atlantic journalist cites him, and has little to do with whatever his blog says.

In times past, for better and for worse, college was generally relegated to an extremely small section of generally over-performing society. And of these a tiny minority would then go on to pursue the post-grad level education that would culminate in becoming a scientist. In today's society college has become high school 2.0. And to some degree post-graduate education is going down the same path. For instance today more than 1 in 8 people have some sort of postgraduate degree. [1] Sourcing that because it just sounds absurd. In other words today more people have a postgraduate education than the total that went to university in the 70s.

This has resulted in an exponential increase in the amount of stuff getting published as well as a simultaneous and comparably sharp decrease in the overall quality of what's getting published. So I would actually tend to agree with you. This cynical state of science is generally pretty accurate for the state of what passes as science today, but it was not always this way. 'Science' as a whole is in many ways reflective of the mean, and in the public mind even the lowest common denominator. And both of those have undoubtedly fallen far below what they were in times past.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...