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Crémieux

Jun 1, 2023 • 8 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X

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American military veterans have a suicide problem.

Some have theorized the reason is deployment-related trauma.

Leveraging the random assignment of new soldiers to units with different deployment cycles, Bruhn et al. found that was wrong.

Deployment did not increase suicides.

Looking only at violent deployments (ones with peer casualties), there aren't noncombat mortality effects either.

What explains veteran suicide rates?

The reason seems to be that the proposition is wrong: veterans do not have increased suicide risk.

This may seem surprising, but it's not. Their suicide rates are elevated over the general population because most of them are young White men. That group has a suicide issue.

There are good and bad parts to this observation.

On the one hand, it means that there is not selection of suicidal people into the military.

On the other, demographic selection makes this problem into one that agencies like the VA will probably not be able to fix on their own

because it's not a soldier problem, it's a young White male problem.

I don't know how this can be fixed, but presumably tackling opiate use would help.

Soliman (2022) found that DEA crackdowns on overprescribing pharmacies resulted in fewer local suicide deaths.

Soliman also found that sanctioning specific doctors affected opioid-related mortality more generally without impacting suicide rates. Effects were generally larger for males than females and they were larger for people aged 30-49 than those aged 15-29 or 85+. No race data.

Kennedy-Hendricks et al. found that Florida's pill mill crackdown reduced opioid overdose mortality considerably.

Their supplement contained details on the characteristics of the people who died from opioid overdoses, but I wasn't able to access it.

Regardless, this problem can

probably be helped to some degree.

Sources:

nber.org/papers/w30622

fivethirtyeight.com/features/suici…

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.21…

More:

bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/resear…

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More from @cremieuxrecueil

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Apr 23

I simulated 100,000 people to show how often people are "thrice-exceptional": Smart, stable, and exceptionally hard-working.

I've highlighted these people in red in this chart:

If you reorient the chart to a bird's eye view, it looks like this:

In short, there are not many people who are thrice-exceptional, in the sense of being at least +2 standard deviations in conscientiousness, emotional stability (i.e., inverse neuroticism), and intelligence.

To replicate this, use 42 as the seed and assume linearity and normality

Read 7 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Apr 22

I would like to live in a high-trust society.

The decline of trust is something worth caring about, and reversing it is something worth doing.

We should not have to live constantly wondering if we're being lied to or scammed. Trust should be possible again.

I don't know how we go about regaining trust and promoting trustworthiness in society.

It feels like there's an immense level of toleration of untrustworthy behavior from everyone: scams are openly funded; academics congratulate their fraudster peers; all content is now slop.

What China's doing—corruption crackdowns and arresting fraudsters—seems laudable, and I think the U.S. and other Western nations should follow suit.

Fraud leads to so many lives being lost and so much progress being halted or delayed.

I'm close to being single-issue on this.

Read 6 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Apr 21

British fertility abruptly fell after one important court case: the Bradlaugh-Besant trial🧵

You can see its impact very visibly on this chart:

The trial involved Annie Besant (left) and Charles Bradlaugh (right).

These two were atheists—a scandalous position at the time!—and they wanted to promote free-thinking about practically everything that upset the puritanical society of their time.

They were on trial because they tried to sell a book entitled Fruits of Philosophy.

This was an American guide to tons of different aspects of family planning, and included birth control methods, some of which worked, others which did not.

Read 14 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Apr 17

One of the really interesting studies on the psychiatric effects of maltreatment is Danese and Widom's from Nat. Hum. Behavior a few years ago.

They found that only subjective (S), rather than objective (O) maltreatment predicted actually having a mental disorder.

Phrased differently, if people subjectively believed they were abused, that predicted poor mental health, but objectively recorded maltreatment only predicted it if there was also a subjective report.

Some people might 'simply' be more resilient than others.

I think this finding makes sense.

Consider the level of agreement between prospective (P-R) and retrospective (R-P) reports of childhood maltreatment.

A slim majority of people recorded being mistreated later report that they were mistreated when asked to recall.

Read 6 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Apr 15

Nature finally published it!

The Reich Lab article on genetic selection in Europe over the last 10,000 years is finally online, and it includes such interesting results as:

- Intelligence has increased
- People got lighter
- Mental disorders became less common

And more!

They've added some interesting simulation results that show that these changes are unlikely to have happened without directional selection, under a variety of different model assumptions.

They also showed that, despite pigmentation being oligogenic, selection on it was polygenic.

"[S]election for pigmentation had an equal impact on all variants in proportion to effect size."

Read 9 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Apr 10

I still think this is one of the most important recent papers on AI in the job market🧵

The website Freelancer added an option to generate cover letters with AI, and suddenly the quality associated with cover letters stopped predicting the odds of people getting hired!

LLMs do a few things to cover letters.

Firstly, they increase the quality, as measured by how well tailored they are to a given job listing.

Second, they make job applications in expensive, so people start spending less time shooting off applications.

More, rapidly-produced job applications becomes the norm.

Read 8 tweets

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