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Notes -
I’m thinking that the competition for selection to eg Columbia, and then Columbia engineering / pre-med, would be so competitive that everyone already has 130iq. The small difference that diet makes would then be more significant than otherwise, because everyone already has intelligence and good habits.
If there is a signal, it'll still be swamped by correlations. The affirmative action students and asians will have different diets. The richer students will eat higher class food, and do better. And there are so many different ways diets can vary, and so many ways to group different foods into potential groups with effects (meat? red meat? lean meat? beef? processed meat? grass fed? organic? non-gmo? all-natural? free-range?) - and all of those groups and foods will ahve their own idiosyncratic correlations with all sorts of other factors - that it'll be impossible to sort signal from noise.
It's not that it's impossible to figure this kind of thing out. There's a lot in econometrics on causal inference with limited kinds of data, and that sometimes works, even if it works less often than economists think imo. But I can't think of anything that'd really work here.
also, the really-effective diets might just not be present in the dataset. let's say you find that vegetarian diets are better than meat diets because the vegetarians are mostly health nuts. but nobody was eating biodynamic pasture-raised bison, goat cheese, sunchokes, and mangos, which is actually the optimal IQ diet, or anything close to that.
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