> two highly overlapping normal distributions with slightly different means
It depends if we talk about means or tail ends. The GP post referred to marathon runners, presumably winning marathon runners, even within the Rift Valley in Kenya don't get selected from the mean of the population but from the tail-end. So, while there isn't much of a difference for means between runners in Albania and Kenya, when we look at tail end we might find very large differences.
Same thing for any case where is a selection process. If you have any "top-X" selection involved, then looking at means is a bit more confusing.
> Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal
Hmm, I don't see here people anyone arguing not treating people as individuals. Of course we have to treat people as individuals. But not sure how that contradicts looking a distribution of traits, features, disease markers, etc.
If the point of the research isn't to create non-individualistic racist policies or to tear down affirmative action policies on the basis of "it's wasted effort" then what's the goal? If we could identify some genetic marker that increased the probability by a few percentage points of identifying intellectual marathon runners would that justify discriminating to favor them at the expense of others? Many dystopian scifi stories start from a similar premise.
> If the point of the research isn't to create non-individualistic racist policies or to tear down affirmative action policies on the basis of "it's wasted effort" then what's the goal?
Maybe you're arguing for or against some point the GP poster made. I was mainly saying relying on means in the particular example doesn't seem to work. I was helping you out! If you wanted to refute GP's point you could have said, "here marathon runners statistics doesn't quite apply".
Yeah I know "the means are closer to each other than the standard deviation" is the "standard" (pun intended) thing that high school and college kids get about difference between men vs women and other population characteristics and you're trying to make a very good point, but it just doesn't always apply and sometimes repeating it when it doesn't apply, instead of convincing people, could end up confusing them.
It depends if we talk about means or tail ends. The GP post referred to marathon runners, presumably winning marathon runners, even within the Rift Valley in Kenya don't get selected from the mean of the population but from the tail-end. So, while there isn't much of a difference for means between runners in Albania and Kenya, when we look at tail end we might find very large differences.
Same thing for any case where is a selection process. If you have any "top-X" selection involved, then looking at means is a bit more confusing.
> Therefore you still have to treat people as individuals because the ancestry provides little signal
Hmm, I don't see here people anyone arguing not treating people as individuals. Of course we have to treat people as individuals. But not sure how that contradicts looking a distribution of traits, features, disease markers, etc.