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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

Jul 2

What happens when scholars get canceled?

They end up publishing fewer papers and they receive fewer citations.

In other words, scientific productivity falls🧵

Tons of scholars have been cancelled in recent years.

That is, they've received professional backlash for expressing views that people deem "controversial, unpopular, or misaligned with prevailing norms."

Cancellations happen outside of academia, but it's very bad in it.

Large portions of the academy dislike the freedom of speech. Many of those free speech opponents have high agency and the clout to cause material harm to people they dislike = particularly bad cancel culture.

Read 13 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Jun 28

You must pick one:

Double the productivity of the bottom 20% or double the productivity of the top 1%:

Double the productivity of the bottom 40% or double the productivity of the top 1%:

Double the productivity of the bottom 60% or double the productivity of the top 1%:

Read 7 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Jun 27

Phenotyping is the vast, minimally-explored frontier in genome-wide association studies.

Important thread🧵

Briefly, phenotyping is how you measure people's traits. Measure poorly, get bad results; measure well, get good results.

Example? Janky knees.

The janky knee example refers to osteoarthritis, the most common form of arthritis, which occurs when the cartilage between bones is worn down, so bones start rubbing against each other.

This ends up being very painful.

Everyone with this condition isn't necessarily diagnosed with it.

This is especially true for men, who tend to just ignore this (and many other conditions) more often than women do.

This is, in a word, annoying, because it means that if you study it, sampling is likely biased.

Read 35 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Jun 25

ADHD is a condition that's suffered from diagnostic drift: it's been defined more leniently over time, so more people are getting diagnosed.

One way to see this is to look at the benefits of taking ADHD medication. As prescription rates increased, the benefits have declined.

Another way to understand diagnostic drift is to look at the factors that promote it.

For example, school accountability laws lead to more diagnoses and, as a result, more psychoactive drug prescriptions.

Schools are pressured by law into making this happen.

An even more direct way to understand ADHD's diagnostic drift is to look at what types of diagnoses happen over time.

The increase has been more about non-severe ADHD than clinical ADHD. In other words, people with less and lesser symptoms are getting diagnosed.

Read 4 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Jun 24

I have a story to break.

Columbia is still practicing racially discriminatory admissions in defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling in SFFA v. Harvard.

Newly-leaked data shows they still prefer less-qualified Blacks and Hispanics over more-qualified Asians🧵

Columbia has made a big show of "complying" with SFFA v. Harvard by noting that their 2024 batch of admits involved slightly less discrimination:

Fewer Black and Hispanic students, more Asian students.

That's what should happen, because Asian students tend to perform better.

But, with this leaked admissions data, we can see that race still predicts admissions.

With fair admissions, race should not have a significant effect, and it should not be directionally consistent.

And yet, in this data, it's clear Columbia still discriminates against Asians.

Read 14 tweets

Crémieux

@cremieuxrecueil

Jun 21

Today's big biotech win is that we might be on the verge of a cure for type-1 diabetes🧵

Twelve diabetics were injected with stem cell-derived pancreatic islets.

They started producing insulin again.

One year in, 10/12 participants no longer needed to inject insulin.

In that chart, you can see the response to a meal.

At baseline, blood sugar levels go dangerously high (right) because participants don't produce insulin at all (proxied by C-peptide levels, left).

But notice the blood sugar and C-peptide levels after treatment:

With treatment, the patients kept getting better and better.

Their pancreatic function improved over time, and they became more and more able to handle food, and to do so without the need to inject insulin.

Read 10 tweets

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