Astral Codex Ten

Kirkegaard

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Kirkegaard

Article

Kirkegaard is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 03, 2025 and December 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “People like Kirkegaard, Piffer, Lasker, etc”; “People like Kirkegaard, Piffer, Lasker”; “if we used Kirkegaard’s adjusted number”. It most often appears alongside Cremieux, IQ, Sasha Gusev.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 03, 2025
  • Last seen: December 03, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Missing Heritability
July 03, 2025 · Original source
You mention epidemiologists being the biggest losers of stratification in polygenic scores, but I think it is important to note a related group: the people who take polygenic scores trained in one population (with a ton of stratification) and directly apply them to other populations to make claims about innate abilities (see: this post). This is especially true for Edu/IQ GWAS, where every behavior geneticist has been screaming "do not do that!" since the very first study came out. People like Kirkegaard, Piffer, Lasker, etc. (and their boosters on social media like Steve Sailer and Cremieux) dedicated their careers to taking crappy GWAS data from and turning it into memes that show Africans on the bottom and Europeans on the top. These people also happen to be the court geneticists, so to speak, for SSC/ACX. I don't mean to come off as antagonistic and I'm sure some people will see this comment and immediately discount me as being an ideologue/Lysenkoist/etc so it does my broader position no favors, but this stuff has done and continues to do an enormous amount of damage to the field (including the now complete unwillingness of public companies like 23andme to collaborate on studies of sensitive traits
Inline links: this post
The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate
December 03, 2025 · Original source
The hereditarians declared victory (Cremieux on X, Emil Kirkegaard on Substack) because of this graph:
Inline links: Cremieux on X, Emil Kirkegaard on Substack
Emil and Cremieux argue that we know why this study found low heritability of IQ. It’s because you can’t give 347,630 people a full-length IQ test. So they gave these people a short crappy IQ-like test with a lot of random noise. Past studies estimated the reliability of this test at 0.61 (low). It’s easy to statistically correct for this; when you do so, you find that if the test had been better, this study would have estimated the heritability of IQ at 55%. This is still on the low end, but it’s already within the hereditarians’ estimate of 50 - 80%, and there are a few other biases that might be bringing it down too (eg healthy volunteer bias).
Inline links: argue
This table compares the heritability found in a typical twin study to the heritability numbers found in the pedigree portion of this study. On average, this study’s numbers are only about 60% as high; IQ isn’t really an outlier (although if we used Kirkegaard’s adjusted number, that wouldn’t be too much of an outlier either).