Top all-time · #6752
Sasha Gusev
Personal blog · theinfinitesimal.substack.comsciencedata
Sasha Gusev writes The Infinitesimal, a personal blog at theinfinitesimal.substack.com about science and data. Since 2024, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sasha Gusev's Substack for its critical treatment of twin studies and heritability, and for a piece on how NIH's processes work. Commenters mostly cite it as support in threads on intelligence and genetics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Thinking about genetics in a world where every variant is causal but only a tiny bit.
Most-linked posts?
- The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-11-24
- /p/book-review-eric-turkheimers-understanding2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-21
- Distinguishing real from invented problems with the NIH2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-23
- Intelligence is not like height2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-08-27
What Hacker News says?
> "warring camps" framing is very overstated ... twin-study practitioner field freely cite GWAS results Ok, good to know :-) > the work now is on characterizing and bounding it Using GWAS I suppose, ok. > "Blog post looks biased" is not a good way ... but those same authors often wrote excitedly about how GWAS results would bolster their priors Ok, yes I think I agree. ... Interesting Thanks for keeping the original…
Comment linking /p/book-review-eric-turkheimers-understanding
on “Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking”Submitted Intelligence is not like height as a story · 64 points
HN discussion> > twin studies and they have taken in serious beating in the past decade, especially in light of GWAS. Here's a twin study from 2015, newer than the books (Clean Slate etc) and papers you (David) mentioned. "Thinking positively: The genetics of high intelligence" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4286575/ Figure 3 indicates that intelligence is pretty strongly inherited, and they arrive at 0.44. Now you're…
Comment linking /
on “Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking”Submitted Population stratification led to a decade of false genetic findings as a story · 32 points
HN discussionDear cutemonster, I know this reply may not suffice to convince you, but unfortunately I won't be able to argue forever. Did you ever consider the possibility that you might be the one living in a bubble? FYI, the concept of innate talent predated IQ tests and twin studies by many millenia. Two of the authors I'm citing in my book (Descartes and Grothendieck) believed that innate talent existed and they both declare…
Comment linking /p/comments-on-no-intelligence-is-not
on “Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking”Submitted Does education increase intelligence and does it matter? (2024) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHere's a really excellent piece on the guts of how NIH's processes work: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/distinguishing-real-...
Comment linking /p/distinguishing-real-from-invented
on “NIH hit with freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring”Submitted Genomic prediction of IQ is modern snake oil as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThat’s not a good summary of what twin studies show. For a more sophisticated discussion: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/book-review-eric-tur...
Comment linking /p/book-review-eric-turkheimers-understanding
on “Personality Basins”Submitted The missing heritability question is now (mostly) answered as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI don't fully understand this blog post, but possibly of interest: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/the-missing-heritabi... In particular, see the third chart, "GREML-WGS heritability estimates," which shows that heritability for height is pretty much the same when they try to adjust for environment in different ways, while the estimates for IQ vary a lot. Gusev seems convinced that some environmental effect…
Comment linking /p/the-missing-heritability-question
on “IQ differences of identical twins reared apart are influenced by education”Submitted Distinguishing real from invented problems with the NIH as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFollow cites from here, and then look at the Twitter conversation between Gusev and Alexander Strudwick Young. https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/the-missing-heritabi...
Comment linking /p/the-missing-heritability-question
on “Twins reared apart do not exist”Submitted Embryo selection: what we talk about when we talk about risk as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSome reading if you'd like to some critical framing of this and similar twin studies and path analysis models: Gusev, S. Twin heritability models can tell you whatever you want to hear. https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/twin-heritability-mo... Feldman Marcus W. and Ramachandran Sohini. 2018. Missing compared to what? Revisiting heritability, genes and culture. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B37320170064 http://doi.org/1…
Comment linking /p/twin-heritability-models-can-tell
on “Why educational inequality runs in families: Genetics more than environment”Especially interesting since intelligence is much more environmental than most people assume: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-n...
Comment linking /p/no-intelligence-is-not-like-height
on “Terence Tao, at 8 years old [pdf]”
