this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
91 points (93.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35779 readers
1132 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Maybe a naive question, but Is there a service like 23 and me but that doesn’t collect/keep my genetic information ? @nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For the record, ancestry dna is basically a scam. Especially when they give you a percentage score.

Ask yourself what is French. Or English. How much interbreeding has happened across the spectrum? It can’t tell you who you are- there is no genetic encoding for culture.

[–] otter@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This makes sense, I don't really know how they come up with those numbers. I feel like there is a realistic risk for harm if we DID try to classify it (ex. If you have X gene, you are Y race). It wouldn't make any sense to begin with, and it would enable arbitrary persecution

I'm more familiar with the inverse, where doctors can provide better care by screening for risks and generic markers that are more common for a particular demographic. That actually helps humanity and is worth studying more

[–] kadu@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

I don't really know how they come up with these numbers

They sample multiple people from a given region of the world and then look at possible genetic similarities between most individuals in that sample.

Then, they collect your genetic data and "match" to all the different signatures they've collected from different regions, and compute a similarity score.

In theory, if they had sufficient samples and the genes were very characteristic, this could work. In practice, any geneticist will be able to point out multiple flaws with this methodology.

There are indeed certain traits that only occur in specific populations... And while someone else totally unrelated could randomly have a similar mutation, it'd be unlikely. But those are rare, and absolutely not something that can be used to say "78% German"

[–] Oaksey@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I’ve always thought when they give those stats “how long ago?”. Where people’s ancestors lived could be quite different during different time periods, that I don’t think can be accurately represented by percentages.

[–] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

particularly considering the way they establish them is by comparing you to modern genetics in those groups, and maybe a census of how they identified in the mailer. But our genetic pool is as clear as mud; there's a lot of mixing going on between groups;