(((Davidski)))

[Zoro]

if you are interested in the genetics of Central and East Europe and the Balkans, G25 is useless for you.
Davidski is biased against this part of the world, and his tool will be uninformative and in some cases even misleading and wrong for you.
yet he has no problem taking money from East Europeans and Balkanians.

see how for example, he didn't include a single Central Greek in his tool, although a dozen are available.

if i'm interested in Central Greeks, on gedmatch i can check the results of all the academic Central Greeks, plus i can dig through the database and find even more real life central Greeks.



you can try to ask him on his blog. i wonder how he'll react.

To understand why Davidski does those types of things you have to go back to 2012 which is a time period probably no one here is familiar with. That’s when he became enemies with the Greek scientist Dienekes Pontikos. If it wasn’t for Pontikos Gedmatch would probably not exist because Dienekes is the guy that produced the DIY Dodecad software which allows calculators to function on Gedmatch.

Needless to say Dienekes was much more skilled with DNA tools than Davidski who was a true amateur and was very lacking on understanding on how these things worked.

You can see some of their arguments from 2012 on Dienekes blog at http://dodecad.blogspot.com/2012/08/...ffect.html?m=1

For example Davidski was foolishly arguing that he understood the calculator effect to which he was truly clueless

Polako also proposes a "solution" to the problem:
I actually designed my Eurogenes ancestry tests for Gedmatch with this problem in mind, by only using academic references to source the allele frequencies. This means that test results for Eurogenes project members and non-members are directly comparable. Perhaps other genome bloggers can eventually do the same?
The only effect of this "solution" is to ensure that there is a "calculator effect" for everyone using his tools. For example, if he uses only published Finns and Lithuanians to build his calculator, then every Finn and Lithuanian who takes his test will wonder why he is "different" from the published Finns and Lithuanians, because they will all suffer a "calculator effect" with respect to the reference populations. So, perhaps they will all be on equal footing with respect to each other, but their results will all be biased because of the issue I had identified.

Moreover, their results will never improve as more people join his Project, because these new people will not be included in newer versions of calculators: all users of DIY Eurogenes tools will continue to receive sub-par results. Well, small consolation, at least they'll all receive comparable sub-par results

12 comments:

AnonymousAugust 11, 2012 at 2:30 PM
I try to ignore Polako as much as possible. It's apparent to everyone with a modicum of critical talent that Eurogenes exists purely to assuage his own ethnic insecurities and at the same time find 'undesirable' admixture in populations he dislikes (basically Southern and Western Europeans). He's not a scientist. He wears his agenda on his sleeve. Polako's thought process can be summarised as thus: If it finds less non-European admixture in Poles, it's correct. If it finds more admixture in Poles, it requires revision.

Reply

DienekesAugust 11, 2012 at 2:46 PM
I try to ignore Polako as much as possible.

That is probably best, but I wanted to prevent other genome bloggers from making the same mistake of thinking that by removing project samples they're actually creating better calculators.

Reply

DavidskiAugust 11, 2012 at 3:13 PM
You're missing the point, as usual.

There are lots of people out there confused RIGHT NOW by the results your tools are producing. They have a right to be confused, because the results are useless.

It doesn't help them that maybe in 5 years you'll have enough samples to eliminate the Calculator Effect from many of your tests.

Have some consideration for other people, and stop thinking about yourself and your blog for once.

Explain clearly why people who aren't part of your project can't rely on your population portraits and oracle results.

Reply

DienekesAugust 11, 2012 at 4:08 PM
You're missing the point, as usual.

There are lots of people out there confused RIGHT NOW by the results your tools are producing. They have a right to be confused, because the results are useless.

It is you who is missing the point.

If there is a "calculator effect", then it affects ALL people who use your tools, because NONE of them have been included in the admixture analysis that produced them. By your own admission, you use only "academic references".

Your "fix" to the problem is to make everyone suffer a bias, including your own project members. The fact that all people (project members or not) who use your tools are on equal footing is no consolation, because they are ALL getting bad results.

In the case of the Dodecad Project, the results obtained by project members are as good as can be hoped for, while the results obtained by non-members using DIY tools may suffer a small bias, which will continue to decrease over time. Moreover, whatever bias exists for the Dodecad Project is reduced compared to an "academic only" approach, because the components are inferred with a larger and more repsentative collection of samples.

There is no magic bullet to obtaining higher accuracy.

Dodecad = Great results for some + slightly biased results for non-participants
Eurogenes = Biased results for everyone, participant and non-participant alike.

[Aren]

People need to stop being so dramatic. David does not care enough about Serbs, Romanians, Campanians, Greeks and whatnot for him to take the time and effort to pick out trollish averages for his spreadsheet. That's just the truth.
If he is biased about one thing, it's the Steppe hypothesis/Kurgan hypothesis and the amount of Indo-European admixture in Northeastern Europe, but that's normal. Everyone is biased about something close to their heart. I can't blame him for that.

[gixajo]

To understand why Davidski does those types of things you have to go back to 2012 which is a time period probably no one here is familiar with. That’s when he became enemies with the Greek scientist Dienekes Pontikos. If it wasn’t for Pontikos Gedmatch would probably not exist because Dienekes is the guy that produced the DIY Dodecad software which allows calculators to function on Gedmatch.

Needless to say Dienekes was much more skilled with DNA tools than Davidski who was a true amateur and was very lacking on understanding on how these things worked.

You can see some of their arguments from 2012 on Dienekes blog at http://dodecad.blogspot.com/2012/08/...ffect.html?m=1

For example Davidski was foolishly arguing that he understood the calculator effect to which he was truly clueless

Sorry, so Davidski created Eurogenes k13 and Dienekes Dodecad?

And as far as i can understand, the polemic about that "calculator effect" was more about a controversy about the idea of ​​each one of how to solve it, and that Deniekes said to have been aware of the existence of that error before Davidski, isn´t it?

[Leto]

People need to stop being so dramatic. David does not care enough about Serbs, Romanians, Campanians, Greeks and whatnot for him to take the time and effort to pick out trollish averages for his spreadsheet. That's just the truth.
If he is biased about one thing, it's the Steppe hypothesis/Kurgan hypothesis and the amount of Indo-European admixture in Northeastern Europe, but that's normal. Everyone is biased about something close to their heart. I can't blame him for that.

Yeah, I don't believe in that either. After all, he makes a buck from what he does, why would he deliberately promote misinformation about certain ethnicities which could potentially result in a profit decrease for him?

[gixajo]

People need to stop being so dramatic. David does not care enough about Serbs, Romanians, Campanians, Greeks and whatnot for him to take the time and effort to pick out trollish averages for his spreadsheet. That's just the truth.
If he is biased about one thing, it's the Steppe hypothesis/Kurgan hypothesis and the amount of Indo-European admixture in Northeastern Europe, but that's normal. Everyone is biased about something close to their heart. I can't blame him for that.

From what I have observed, there are at least two ways to be biased, one to defend what you like, and one to attack what you hate.

But there is still something worse than the use of biased arguments to defend or attack an idea, and these are the people who do not directly argue biased against the ideas, if not what they do is cancel the opposite argument, simply discrediting the transmitter of the ideas.

[JerryS.]

Yeah, I don't believe in that either. After all, he makes a buck from what he does, why would he deliberately promote misinformation about certain ethnicities which could potentially result in a profit decrease for him?

As I understand it his is the only game in town regarding the G25 coordinates. If there was another game in town then there's competition for them to require each to tweak their product for best results.

[Caballero]

Even if he wasn't so good in 2012, people within 8 years can drastically improve their skills and understanding. He could have gotten 2 degrees during that timeline lol.

I think he is ok in general, Dienekes was alright too but Davidski is more knowledgeable.

[JerryS.]

To understand why Davidski does those types of things you have to go back to 2012 which is a time period probably no one here is familiar with. That’s when he became enemies with the Greek scientist Dienekes Pontikos. If it wasn’t for Pontikos Gedmatch would probably not exist because Dienekes is the guy that produced the DIY Dodecad software which allows calculators to function on Gedmatch.

Needless to say Dienekes was much more skilled with DNA tools than Davidski who was a true amateur and was very lacking on understanding on how these things worked.

You can see some of their arguments from 2012 on Dienekes blog at http://dodecad.blogspot.com/2012/08/...ffect.html?m=1

For example Davidski was foolishly arguing that he understood the calculator effect to which he was truly clueless

That's quite the back-and-forth on this topic between those 2 that I did not know existed. There are people with 1/4 deep South Italian that use Dodcad and get that reflected properly but then use Eurogenes and it gets diluted to look like they are almost half North Italian. I always wondered why.

[Voskos]

He thinks he's entitled to badmouth even scientists who publish peer-reviewed papers on a regular basis. A clear case of narcissism combined with armchair science.

[gixajo]

I am unable to judge who was right or wrong between the two of them, with what little I know about them and their work just now. Each one had a way of understanding their work, and each one went their own way. Thanks to this, we now have more options to have fun with these things. The more points of view we have about something, even assuming that some of them could be wrong, the more we will learn about that issue.