>Studying the genetics of participation using footprints left on the ascertained genotypes

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-023-01439-2

As was my father, and my father's father, and his father's father before him. My people come from the Land of Those Who Enroll in Genetic Studies. Our motto is "Doing Nations A Solid". Our flag has 23 stars. Do not call us "inbred"; we are simply family-friendly. Every February 3 (or 2 March if we are European) we gather for a family reunion where we spend 23 hours enrolling in every possible genetic study, and then the parents retire to their rooms where they joyously exchange genetic data with each other. (A lot of us are born around November 3!)

Family²

Yes. All surveys are biased towards people who are willing to take the survey.

In the most extreme case, if your survey only has one question, "are you willing to take this survey?" you would get 100% "yes".

More likely around 96%. Don't neglect the Lizardman Constant.

I just looked that up. Surely there's a non-zero percentage of people who do sincerely think David Icke's lizard people secretly control things.

I'm not claiming the insincerity constant is actually 0 but claiming it's 4% based on the assumption that those who must answer are being insincere, I think is incorrect.

Also have you taken those phone surveys? They go into "I really don't care" territory fast. "Now tell me, if you were going to buy toilet paper and there was a Walgreens, Rite-Aid, CVS, and Krogers, on a scale of 1 to 5, how often would you go into the Walgreens?"

Would it be possible to remove that survey bias using coercion? For example, we could hire a gang to break into a supermarket and hold everyone there as hostages until they fill out a consumer preferences and brand visibility survey.

The problem with this idea is that you're likely to get bad data: people forced into doing a survey aren't likely to want to answer honestly. Also remember, many surveys require you to think: "On a scale of 1 to 10, how often do you do X?" Answering this question honestly and accurately requires some thought. If you're forced to answer a barrage of questions like this before you're allowed to leave, the easiest and fastest thing to do is just mark the same number for all of them, or just a bunch of random numbers.

This is exactly why I think mandatory voting is stupid. Supporters claim it's better for democracy and forces people to choose leaders that represent them, but it doesn't: you can't force someone to care. You can't force someone to make an informed choice, instead of just randomly checking a box on a ballot.

We have statistical data from every Australian election (which has compulsory voting) on how many people donkey vote/protest vote, and it's not that many. If you're talking about people attempting to protest in subtly undetectable ways (i.e. not the easiest methods like leave blank, 12345, scribble, penis) by simply casting their vote in a random order that isn't a donkey vote, well if any substantial number of people were doing that then we should see a significant effect where irrelevant minor parties receive approximately equal numbers of votes to each other. In reality compulsory voting in Australia produces clear two-party dynamics, with third-party challengers and a reasonably dynamic system. There have been individual years where large numbers of smaller parties and independents were elected (relative to historical norms, not in absolute numbers), but these occurred at times of disillusionment with the major parties that would explain these effects, and this isn't a standard effect in Australian politics despite the voting system always being compulsory. Basically, real participation in voting is most likely in excess of 90% of the people who are formally registered as having voted, so your hypothesis that compulsory voting leads to an issue with voters not caring and just voting whatever isn't correct.

>In reality compulsory voting in Australia produces clear two-party dynamics, with third-party challengers and a reasonably dynamic system.

What makes you think the people who don't want to vote aren't just picking whichever name they've heard the most?

>Basically, real participation in voting is most likely in excess of 90% of the people who are formally registered as having voted

90% is not 100%, so it seems there's some people who still don't care. What makes you think you need compulsory voting to get people to care enough to cast a meaningful and honest vote, or that those 90% wouldn't care enough to vote even without it being compulsory?

>What makes you think the people who don't want to vote aren't just picking whichever name they've heard the most?

You're moving the goalposts, and frankly your new criteria isn't significantly different from an uncharitable description of various non-compulsory Western democracies.

>90% is not 100%, so it seems there's some people who still don't care. What makes you think you need compulsory voting to get people to care enough to cast a meaningful and honest vote, or that those 90% wouldn't care enough to vote even without it being compulsory?

Evidence? Go and look at voting participation rates and ballot spoiling data in compulsory vs non-compulsory voting countries.

>frankly your new criteria isn't significantly different from an uncharitable description of various non-compulsory Western democracies.

What makes you think those democracies actually choose good leaders? Honestly, I'm not aware of any countries that consistently pick good leaders; all systems for choosing leaders (democratic or otherwise) are bad, so debating them is just about debating which is less bad. Some are much worse than others.

>Go and look at voting participation rates and ballot spoiling data in compulsory vs non-compulsory voting countries.

You still haven't proven that voters in compulsory countries are actually being made to care and are conscientiously picking a candidate based on any real research. This isn't moving the goalposts; you simply haven't shown how the compulsory system actually produces better results. Australia isn't exactly known for picking great leadership. I'd say it does better than America, but that's an extremely low bar and easily explained by other factors.

>What makes you think those democracies actually choose good leaders? Honestly, I'm not aware of any countries that consistently pick good leaders; all systems for choosing leaders (democratic or otherwise) are bad, so debating them is just about debating which is less bad. Some are much worse than others.

I don't think that at all. Any bourgeois democracy has fundamental failings. I just disagree with your characterisation of compulsory voting as being stupid.

>You still haven't proven that voters in compulsory countries are actually being made to care and are conscientiously picking a candidate based on any real research.

You haven't proven that they're just ticking a box randomly like you originally said. There are other benefits of compulsory voting, as well, like it being significantly more difficult to suppress voters.

>There are other benefits of compulsory voting, as well, like it being significantly more difficult to suppress voters.

Yes, another responder here in this thread wrote a good post explaining how this works. It's the best argument I've seen yet for compulsory voting.

> you can't force someone to care.

Even worse: there do exist quite some people who do care a lot, and thus become very radicalized about the politicians and the political system.

The real value of mandatory voting has little to do with how people actually vote. Even if 95% of voters submitted blank ballots or wrote in "Mickey Mouse", I strongly suspect you'd get a better outcome than we see in countries with voluntary voting.

The main value of mandatory voting is that it makes it very hard for politicians to reason about which demographics they should cater to and which demographics they can ignore. Even if only 5% of voters vote honestly (the real number, of course, is vastly higher than that, as we see in Australia), politicians don't know who did and who didn't.

When only a portion of the population shows up to the booth, their demographic data is freely available. This means that politicians focus on the needs/desires of demographics that vote the most.

Also, voter suppression is not a thing in places with mandatory voting. Legislators don't bother writing laws to make voting harder for some demographics than others when everyone has to vote anyway.

Now these are some really good arguments in favor of mandatory voting.

Does someone preferring being shot result in a response?

Yes, that's how they do the GDP survey.

The claim in question is that they are genetically predisposed to, that that they’re simply predisposed to.

Not if I force someone to unwillingly take your survey!

but then what if I force them to unwillingly punch you in the face and shout "NO!"?

I'm sure we can factor all this into the p-value somehow.

give it to enough people and there will likely be that one person who just wants to see the world burn...their answer will be something like "hotdog juice"

But what if they say no?

Looks good to me as long as the only answer in the survey is the "no"

That's only true if everyone given the form will take it as seriously as you do, which is unlikely; some people will respond "no" out of spite, or humor.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0013189X14534297

A great example of self-selection bias

It may be the gene that controls for credulity, as those with the gene for paranoia are unlikely to cede their genetic information to some shady company.

There is more or less nothing useful someone can do with your genetic information, and there's no way you can prevent anyone from having it, since you leave it everywhere you go.

It’s worth noting that the reason nothing “useful” can be done with genetic information in the United States is the Genetic information Nondiscrimination act of 2008.

This prevents insurers from denying coverage or increasing premiums based on genetic information. It also prevents employers from making hiring or promotion decisions based on genetics.

These are the most straightforward ways in which companies could profit off your genetic information. Basically denying insurance coverage or employment if they think you’re likely to get ill from a genetic disease.

There’s also a much murkier aspect in which employers could try to guess your intelligence based on genetics. I’m absolutely certain employers would do try to do this despite it having virtually no utility.

The main reason you can't be denied health insurance anymore is the preexisting conditions ban in the ACA. That's a much stronger signal than your SNPs.

But most privacy complaints here come from the idea that an evil corporation is going to get specifically your genes, look at them, and then somehow invent a super profitable medicine from that. Which doesn't really make sense.

I have never heard that concern before ever, in all of my life, a not insignificant portion of which has been in privacy minded communities that care very much about genetic privacy. The major concerns are:

1. Government surveillance, so that the government can take a sample from anywhere you've ever been and tie you directly to that location, like having cops constantly monitoring a GPS tracker on you. The government does this now through long range scanning, and there's plenty of puff pieces about how it's used to find serial killers and rapists, not much written about the dangers of parallel construction and unethical surveillance of political opposition. Genetic privacy prevents these abuses.

2. Privatised eugenics programs. Insurers denying or granting coverage and employers hiring or firing based on genetics is part of it, but genetic screening as an input to embryo selection is also being done all the time by modern eugenicists, and I'm not talking about disease prevention. Some of these people want "charities" which attempt to sterilise as many people as they can who they consider to be undesirable, and if they had access to genetic data it would make that a lot easier. Genetic privacy prevents these abuses.

I don't even know where you got the idea that genetic privacy advocates are worried that a company will look at their genes and make a really profitable drug out of that process somehow. Was this maybe a movie or videogame that you watched some time? Or misremembering/misinterpreting the real practice of pharmaceutical companies going into indigenous communities, using their knowledge of which plants and animals have medicinal properties, then patenting the medicines they only found based on that indigenous knowledge without any of the value from that transaction going to the people who actually discovered and relayed the information?

This feels like the "if you have nothing to hide..." argument for DNA.

It looks decent on the surface, but the more you dig in the more issues arise. Thinking about it for 30s:

- profiling is a direct use of DNA. Police had access to private dna banks and used the information extensively. Who else is using these same dna banks ?

- the same way people don't want AI farms to ingest their content, you might not want dna bases to ingest and process your dna for profit. You might actually eish a more ethical entity gets sole access to your information.

- you don't leave your dna everywhere. Getting a full dna sequence from hair or fingerprints is a myth at this point.

Knowing I'm a FUT2 non-secreter has actually been pretty useful to me a few times not having to worry about taking care of people in norovirus outbreaks.

Out of sheer curiosity, I've mailed a swab taken from my mouth, after payment, so long ago, I can't remember which came first: that, or me closing my first Facebook account and becoming techno anxious (paranoid of some sort). I'm guessing I like trying stupid things before reflecting on them, because novelty factor.

This study was done using data from the UK Biobank [1] which is registered as a non-profit. Participants were also volunteers only.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Biobank

It's quite a fun thought experiment to think about how you might avoid this bias.

Send Blackhawk helicopters to collect samples by force? Was there bias in the selection technique? What about the people genetically predisposed to avoid the Blackhawk helicopters? We'd need multiple collection methods, and still need to retain an unbiased distribution. You can continue until you get to "we should set up global search patterns so that no human can escape our dystopian DNA collection". And even then you're still biased by population effects owing to the probability that there is a genetic population who have been predisposed to suppress their own genetic population at this point in time.

Gosh, it sounds like a fever dream.

Bias in surveys is an interesting and hard problem to think about, but not really a new one. Seems to me like the typical demographic control approaches would work here too.

Why not take DNA from randomly selected trashcans, since discarded waste can be used to steal DNA

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/07/20/police....

Even then, you'd bias your sample toward people who use those trash cans (people who live near the trash cans you selected, people who don't litter, people who spend a lot of time in public if they are public trash cans, etc.)

Did they control for culture? No? Then we explain this coincidence with "Children do as their parents did"

Similarly, we can claim genetic basis for wanting an education, investing in the stock market, choosing a Chevy over a Ford, going to Gramma Ethyl's at Christmas.

It's right there in the article.

> The analysis done by Kong and his student relies on the key idea that a genetic sequence that occurs more frequently in participants than in nonparticipants will also occur more frequently in the genetic regions that are shared by two related participants.

> Put differently, a bit of DNA that is common in the population will show up frequently in the study. But it will still only have a 50/50 chance of showing up in the child of someone who carried a copy. If a bit of DNA makes people more likely to enroll in genetic studies, it will be more common both in the overall data and among closely related family members.

> So they checked the genetic sequences shared between first-degree relatives—either parents and children or siblings (but not twins)—in the UK Biobank.

Ok I guess that explains it. Still not following too well. If it's more common thatn 50/50 in children in the study of parents in the study, then it's probably involved in making 'genetic study' a predisposition?

Still pretty thin, maybe. Could be intelligence, or outgoing nature, or adaptability. Not some mysterious 'genetic study' gene.

Yes, no one's saying that people evolved a predisposition for participating in genetic studies specifically. It'll be some other traits like you suggested. The research is just saying "these databases are not randomly selected and we can prove it using only the database content". This is useful info to keep in mind when using the databases to draw conclusions.

I'd be more concerned if other studies didn't have the same genes. That is, is there something special about genetic study volunteers. If not, then no worse that the rest?

The right question to ask is: How big is the cumulative effect size of these genetic differences? The answer is — detectible but also negligible for most research purposes (bias correction). Even negligible effects can be highly “significant” based on statistical criteria when sample size is large enough.

The authors summarize the effect size in terms of standard deviation units. Here is the text, where pPGS mean “participation polygenic score” that is used to summarized the genetic scores influencing participation likelihood in UK Biobank.

“The pPGS with weights derived from the GWASs using data of the first half (pPGS1) has average value for the second half of the sibling pairs that is 0.044 s.d. higher than that of the unrelateds (P=5.0×10−6). In reverse, the first half of the sibling pairs have average pPGS2 value, weights derived from the second half, that is 0.026 s.d. higher than the unrelateds (P=8.5×10−3).”

To put this into context: From Wikipedia: “… the average height for adult men in the United States is about 70 inches, with a standard deviation of around 3 inches.” That means that 0.05 s.d. units is equivalent 0.15 inches or 0.38 cm.