Round-up: Mythological motifs and race

The most interesting articles that came to our attention this week

The Genetic Lottery Goes to School: Better Schools Compensate for the Effects of Students’ Genetic Differences. Rosa Cheesman and colleagues examine whether better schools can compensate for children’s genetic disadvantages. Analysing data from Norway, they find that they can—though the reduction is only modest. A one standard deviation increase in school quality reduces the effect of a polygenic score on reading test scores by 6%.

Superhuman performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician. Peter Brodeur and colleagues compare LLMs and human physicians in terms of diagnostic ability. In five out of five experiments, they find that LLMs perform better than human physicians. Unsurprisingly, more recent models outperform older ones. OpenAI’s o1 model performs particularly well—and far better than human physicians.