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Crémieux Profile picture
@cremieuxrecueil
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. Image
Looking only at violent deployments (ones with peer casualties), there aren't noncombat mortality effects either.

What explains veteran suicide rates? Image
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. Image
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. Image
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 Image
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 Profile picture
Jan 7
The host of NPR's This American Life once tried to raise a pit bull with his now ex-wife.

He let the dog ruin his life🧵

He ended up getting it on Prozac and Valium, feeding it kangaroo and ostrich, and making excuses for the many times it would attack people.Image
Ira Glass' wife had a dog before they got married, but it died right before the ceremony.

That dog was a pit bull and it was a rescue, so they decided it would be good to rescue another one.

Per him, it originally came with the "slave name" Marley, which he changed to Piney. Image
Shortly after taking him home, Piney seemingly developed severe allergies to whatever he was eating.

So, Ira and his wife got him set up with a doctor. In fact, they got him set up with four doctors.

And they started spending more time cooking for the dog than for themselves. Image
Read 18 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 5
Pit bulls were bred to fight.

Animals in nature are not like that. Tigers and lions? They don't seek out combat. Nature doesn't seem to want to breed them into unrelenting killers.

This is why Britain banned the sport of "lion baiting"🧵 Image
The nature of "baiting" is torment.

The idea is to put large, powerful animals like bulls or lions in the ring with several dogs, and the winner lives.

The sport has existed for thousands of years. One of our first records is of Indians showing it to Alexander the Great. Image
The first record in England comes from 1610 and features King James I requesting the Master of the Beargarden—a bear training facility—to provide him with three dogs to fight a lion.

Two of the dogs died and the last escaped because the lion did not wish to fight and retreated. Image
Read 18 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 4
There are ZERO rich countries that haven't embraced markets. Image
You could say something like 'Ah, but this is just because the economic freedom index is constructed that way.'

No, it's not. We can all go and read how it's made. It's detailed every year. Failed excuse. Moreover, this has unintended predictive power:

fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/…Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/09/29/a-study-of-lights-at-night-suggests-dictators-lie-about-economic-growth
You could say 'Ah, but this is about sanctions.'

That makes no sense.

For one, there's no supportive pattern of sanctions. For two, you can develop in near-autarky, and before post-WW2, that was comparatively what the most developed countries were dealing with. Link: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
Read 4 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Jan 4
How risky is it to own a pit bull?

I'm not talking fatalities, but bites, because bites are still a bad outcome and any dog who bites should be put down.

If we take the annual risk a dog bites its owner, scale it for pit bulls and Golden Retrievers, and extrapolate 30 years... Image
How do you calculate this?

Simple.

First, we need estimates of the portion of the U.S. population bitten by dogs per year. Next, to adjust that, we need the portion of those bites that are to owners. So, for overall dogs, we get about 1.5% and roughly ~25% of that.

Then, to obtain lifetime risk figures, we need to pick a length for a 'lifetime'. I picked thirty years because that's what I picked. Sue me. It's about three dog lifetimes.

P(>=1 bite) = 1-(1-p)^t
It's pure probability math. To rescale for the breed, we need estimates of the relative risk of different dog being the perpetrators of bites. We'll use the NYC DOHMH's 2015-22 figures to get the risk for a Golden Retriever (breed = "Retriever" in the dataset) relative to all other dogs, and Lee et al. 2021's figures to get the risk for a pit bull. The results don't change much just using the NYC figures, they just became significantly higher risk for the pit bulls.

To rescale 'p' for b reed, it's just p_{breed} = p_{baseline} \times RR_{breed}.

Then you plug it back into the probability of a bite within thirty years. If you think, say, pit bulls are undercounted for the denominator for their RR, OK! Then let's take that to the limit and say that every 'Black' neighborhood in New York has one, halve the risk noticed for them, and bam, you still get 1-in-5 to 1-in-2.5 owners getting bit in the time they own pit bulls (30 years).

And mind you, bites are not nips. As Ira Glass had to be informed when he was talking about his notorious pit bull, it did not just "nip" two children, it drew blood, and that makes it a bite.

Final method note: the lower-bound for Golden Retriever risk was calculated out as 0.00131%, but that rounded down to 0. Over a typical pet dog lifespan of 10-13 years, an individual Golden Retriever will almost-certainly not bite its owner even once, whereas a given pit that lives 11.5 years will have an 18-33% chance of biting, and if we use the DOHMH RRs, it's much higher. If we use the DOHMH RR and double their population, that still holds.

The very high risk of a bite associated with a pit bull is highly robust and defies the notion that '99.XXXX% won't ever hurt anyone.' The idea that almost no pit bulls are bad is based on total fatality risk and it is a farcical argument on par with claiming that Great White Sharks shouldn't be avoided because they kill so few people.

Frankly, if we throw in non-owner risk, the typical pit bull *will* hurt some human or some animal over a typical pet dog's lifespan. And because pit bulls live a little bit shorter, you can adjust that down, but the result will still directionally hold because they are just that god-awful of a breed.

Final note:

Any dog that attacks a human or another dog that wasn't actively attacking them first should be put down. That is a big part of why this matters. These attacks indicate that the dogs in question must die.
Sources:

injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/14/5/2…

veterinaryworld.org/Vol.13/March-2…

escholarship.org/uc/item/103520…, x.com/cremieuxrecuei…

cremieux.xyz/p/the-dogs-of-…
Read 4 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Dec 31, 2025
The male advantage in strength is insanely large.

Even when men and women are matched on muscle, men tend to be far stronger.

Add in that men tend to be to women like what linebackers are to normal men, and you might wonder how more women aren't constantly in fear. Image
This logic applies very strongly.

Consider this: female athletes are generally weaker than average men! Image
Sex differences in strength are profound.

Sources:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aj…

link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Read 4 tweets
Crémieux Profile picture
Dec 31, 2025
Let us never forget:

The Father of the American pit bull, one John P. Colby, didn't stop breeding them even after they

KILLED HIS NEPHEW and MAULED HIS SISTER

This breed has been malign since its creation. Excerpt from Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon. Page 70.
Pit bulls were also killing disabled people shortly after their invention.

This headline is from 1901.

Basically, what happened is that this woman had an epileptic fit, so her pit bull, being the nanny dog it is, decided to eat through her neck.

Helpful! Image
Even a single year after they were recognized in 1896, they had begun hurting people.

In this instance, one mutilated a woman in front of her four-year-old grandchild. Image
Read 4 tweets

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