23andme
Scott Adams, best known as the author of Dilbert, has died. According to Wikipedia:
He said that he was "about half German" and had English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and Dutch ancestry. In 2016, he said he had a small amount of Native American ancestry, but later discovered via 23andMe genetic testing that he has no detectable Native American genetic markers.
I'm a blogger who doesn't have a lot of traffic and I make almost nothing financially from my blogs, so I'm free to speak my mind and hope that if it has unexpected consequences, they are positive while assuming I'm howling into the void and nothing I say matters to anyone.
In 2023, Adams made public comments that were interpreted as racist -- I didn't hear whatever he said, I'm just repeating what Wikipedia says -- and Dilbert was dropped by multiple newspapers and its distributor.
If you are someone and you try to challenge the status quo or question something or make some kind of point about actual reality and money or public reputations or whatever are potentially impacted, it can come back to bite you. You need to do it very carefully and be diplomatic and support it with substantial evidence like it's a court case knowing the court of public opinion is vastly harsher than the legal system with no real checks and balances.
I'm a big fat nobody and I call BS here. What are you going to do? Not visit my website nor support my Patreon? Like you're already not doing?
No, I'm not claiming Adams was for sure part Native and 23andme is wrong. I'm saying I don't believe the service has the data necessary to assert confidently he's not part Native and wording like he has no detectable Native American genetic markers are weasle words and legalese that will stand up in court as not technically a lie while being incredibly deceptive in practice.
For five years, I worked for a Fortune 500 company and learned that no matter how honest, upstanding etc. you are, if you do anything in public, you need to run certain things past a lawyer and make sure it's defensible in a court of law in case some whack job decides to sue, possibly for frivolous reasons or possibly for the obvious motive of "I'm broke and you got money and I want some."
I worked in insurance. The "product" they sell is a check when you need it. Everyone wants a piece of that and the entire industry is a running battle between customers trying to milk them for money in an abusive fashion and insurance trying to protect themselves from being bled dry and put out of business through no fault of their own.
Unlike me, 23andme makes a ton of money from its work, so they need to be able to defend themselves from every random jerk filled with hatred because your ancestors shafted my ancestors or whatever and every greedy bastard who wants to sue someone on some excuse in hopes of "winning the lottery."
It is not in the best interest of 23andme to deeply care about having adequate scientific data to reliably answer questions about heritage to some standard of scientific accuracy.
I'm failing to readily come up with the right words to say this. I'm a blogger and can't afford to run every post past a lawyer.
I mean their product is "sciency" in terms of "Cool, woohoo, pretty patterns called genetic markers!" And that piece is not sufficient to state unequivocally "These patterns say this about who had sex with whom over thousands of years ultimately leading to your existence."
You need data to tell you what those pretty patterns say about your heritage to make claims about your heritage based on genetic testing. They have some general data for certain demographics. They don't have that much for other demographics, including Native Americans.
A reminder: "Native American" is a broad classification, like "European" or "African." What they have is a little like saying "Some samples of a handful of Parisians."
If you are metaphorically speaking a Native American the equivalent of Spanish, British, Norwegian, Italian or any number of other flavor of European, their data will return a result of "No detectable Native American genetic markers." even if you are 100 percent Native American but not related to some handful of Cherokee or whatever that they profiled for marketing purposes so they could sell more tests.
I've seen some things that suggest you may be able to use their results for health purposes but my understanding is this is not marketed as medical testing.
My impression is it began as kind of a fun thing to do. "LOOKIE HERE! Modern tech has empowered us to do a DNA profile of anyone fairly cheaply and easily. Sounds fun!"
It began as a gee, golly whiz, that's cool! thing. It was apparently intended to be good clean fun, like getting your horoscope cast which is popular as a fun way to think about who you are and talk about it with people close to you while many people decry astrology as nonsense only a fool would take seriously. "For entertainment purposes only."
The company has been controversial because what was intended as good, clean fun has at times destroyed marriages and had other serious consequences because it doesn't just say "Hey, hey, listen. You are 25 percent French, 25 percent German and 50 percent Mongolian! Aren't those some fun factoids to discuss at Christmas dinner where everyone already knew you had a German grandparent, a French grandparent and two Mongolian grandparents!"
No, it also says "Your sample has been matched to others in our database and the genetic profile plus age implies this may be a half sibling you didn't know about."
Genetic data ends up being inseparable from information on who mated with whom and you can't catalog it without incidentally creating records of illicit affairs, buried pasts and other "unmentionable in polite society" human activities.
To my knowledge, the company hasn't really owned up to the fact that what was intended as a frivolous bit of fun that would do no harm -- similar to getting your horoscope done at a fair for a few bucks and a computer print out of possible character traits -- has turned out to be much more serious for some portion of their clients.
Over time, perception of this casual sciency bit of fun has shifted and people who were, say, adopted intentionally use it for more serious goals than looking up trivia online about the cultures of their ancestors.
The company is apparently trying hard to cover its own butt rather than adequately look out for the interests of customers. They strike me as having been founded with an express interest in lining their own pockets by doing something fun and trivial to try to avoid grappling with serious problems.
They weren't looking to cure cancer or make the world a better place. They were looking to make money without any serious responsibilities or drama.
The end result is they aren't rising to the occasion in the face of running into the fact that it is having serious consequences.
I sympathize with the desire to pay their bills without fighting some big heroic fight. That's my goal and has been for years and I'm failing at it.
Probably in part because I don't put my blinders on about the fact that seemingly trivial activities can have serious consequences and I take it seriously when I realize "That's not actually funny and harmless unless you buy the societal lies about a long list of social ills and then it's still not harmless. It means you are part of the problem, not part of the solution, for every social ill you are casually reinforcing for your convenience so you can pay your bills."
I'm not trying to do a hit piece on 23andme, though I know this piece potentially has serious business implications for them. It's just like they didn't intentionally set out to tell you your daddy fathered a child he may not have even known about and now your mom is leaving him over it, oops!
To be clear, the story I'm thinking of didn't even involve infidelity. He fathered a child before they got together but she left anyway.
This isn't being written to attack 23andme. This blog was born of my interest in my Native heritage. Like Scott Adams, I believe I'm a very small part Native American.
I don't have a test from 23andme. I'm not one of their customers.
Self-reported Census data is not a reliable dataset for the US and doesn't really catalog how many Americans alive today are a small part Native and I have no reason to believe 23andme is a better source of data on that issue and every reason to believe it is not.
I think they have had a case of drift in their business model where the initial intent, perception and use was one thing and now it's something else. It happened gradually and there was likely no conscious and intentional conspiracy to double down on systemic racism.
Laziness, self interest and lack of scientific and ethical rigor drove this.
But that's true of a lot of systemic racism. I'm not claiming it makes them innocent.
So until we have data better than "self reported lies your grandma told you for compelling reasons in an evil country that LYNCHED people who weren't White," I'm going to say "I believe that blurb I probably found on Twitter years ago and no longer have the link for that 40 to 60 percent of us are part Native."
I don't believe 23andme constitutes better data than the lies your grandma told you that you in good faith dutifully repeated on the US census in a country that actively discourages "White" people from claiming to be "mixed" under circumstances where that's likely to get you accused of being a Pretendian.
If you are Native -- or someone like me who sincerely believes you are part Native based on the best information you have -- the fact that 23andme engages in deceptive practices misrepresenting what they are qualified to say about you should concern you.
And it's not innocent behavior merely because they weren't trying to offer a medical test or something with adequate scientific rigor to close cold case files or otherwise serious work and were hoping to make money at something trivial and harmless similar to selling horoscopes at the fair.
They figured out a lot of years ago this is having serious consequences for their customers. They should up their game on taking this seriously or find some other means to limit their liability that doesn't involve casually shafting people for gee golly whiz cool science with NO CONSEQUENCES! when they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that's not true.
Options for limiting liability include:
1. Not divulging matches of relatives.
2. Stating clearly "We simply do not have the data needed to determine Native heritage."
It may be a bit late to do either of those without incurring substantial legal liability for past activities and/or significant material harm to their business model. Again, self interest is precisely why they are shafting their customers and engaging in behavior with significant widespread societal consequences.
So I'm not holding my breath on them ever trying to do the right thing.
They are currently defacto creating a vast data set that is perceived of as having scientific rigor it lacks and using weasle words likely approved of by a lawyer or marketing department with intent to keep the money rolling in. One of the consequences of this is they are adding perceived scientific rigor to racial and ethnic lies in self-reported Federal data that also gets assumed to be highly reliable due to being from the Federal government and don't confuse people with the facts.
And no one is meaningfully trying to determine the truth here and if they did try, they would be fighting an uphill battle where challenging the current status quo would be laughed off "because we have vaunted FEDERAL data that says X plus very sciency sounding garbage data from 23andme. SOUNDS LEGIT!"
Their genetic tests may well be completely and totally accurate to a high degree of scientific rigor with regards to "We are 99.9999999999 percent certain THESE are your alleles." But they do not have adequate information to state unequivocally "Therefore you don't have the slightest trace of Native heritage."
That's what their wording sounds like it is claiming because the blurb on Wikipedia being broadcast to millions of people isn't attached to pages and pages of vague provisos found on their website. The last time I bothered to try to look into this, those explanations on their site are, again, marketing efforts designed to sound like their report has scientific rigor.
They are saying "Please, buy my product." while using language and procedures defensible in a court of law should they ever get sued. This is the opposite of trying to clearly and unequivocally communicate "We have very limited data on Native American genetics and aren't genuinely trying to establish some kind of two-factor authentication for information of that sort."
Native rights: Not their problem. Their service was intended to be for entertainment purposes only.
And they absolutely do not care one tiny bit how much damage this does to oppressed people unlikely to have the means to drag them into court, much less more trivial details like "Some blogger chick is unlikely to purchase a test because she thinks it probably will say she's a Pretendian."
And I don't believe I am.